In England a lot of the talk of sugery drink tax has focused on sodas, with a bit of Public Health[1] awareness raising about fruit juices, and some very recent media attention on the ridiculous amounts of sugar in coffee drinks.
A lot of the media coverage of this spoke about it in terms of "big gulp" sodas and the like, or stores that allow any size soda for the same price (incl. very large ones), which it seems led to this perception of the issue.
> I suspect it's a class issue: politicians see soda as something that poor, obese people drink, but a white chocolate mocha is not.
To drink one of those coffees you have to actually go to Costa Coffee or Starbucks. It's too expensive to drink daily for the vast majority of the population. And most people who go to coffee shops don't drink those anyway. All of those would suggest that the public health effects of the two are vastly different. The tax should apply to both, but from a public health perspective I doubt it matters.
I see your argument as support for why it should be taxed just as aggressively. The people who can afford those kinds of drinks could also afford the extra bit of taxes. The companies could also afford those taxes, because the markup on those kinds of drinks is absolutely insane.
The tax on soda seems to be about correcting behavior and raising money, while the tax on sugary coffee drink seems to be mostly about raising money. And extra 0.10 on a mocha whatever isn't going to stop people from buying them.
> And most people who go to coffee shops don't drink that anyway.
This isn't true. I worked at a Starbucks while in college and frappuccinos are very very popular. The majority of people who go to Starbucks order drinks with sugar, especially after the morning rush where a many people will just get black coffee... some of those people also add sugar, too. Caramel Frappuccino's and Caramel Macchiato are 2 of the most popular items on the menu, and Frappuccino's are much more popular in the summer.
It's terrible! Those drinks seem to be a socially acceptable way to eat a pint of ice cream and whipped cream at 8am. Because it has "coffee" in the name.
Consumption taxes are inherently fraught with 'class issues' - they act in a similar way to parking fines.
If you earn 50K a year then 10 quid for a bottle of wine that cost 2 quid to produce isn't really a problem.
If you earn 10K a year and have nothing left after rent, it is.
Another point to consider is that 'encouraging people to eat healthily' is an attempt to impose a culture - that's half of what a 'class' is (the other half being income/wealth). It's essentially saying - live like us, we're better, society will be better if you're like us.
The elite don't need to care about their impact on the NHS - the middle classes are probably paying enough in taxes - the poor aren't.
Common rhetoric at the moment in the UK is to decry any notion of taxes as redistribution - the poor are openly considered 'scroungers' by the government - it's pretty much business as usual these days for the state to minimize the impact of the poor on the rest of society.
> 'encouraging people to eat healthily' is an attempt to impose a culture
I see it as an attempt to save money, or rather an attempt to account for all the externalities - that is, at least if there is scientific consensus that the measure you're introducing statistically helps people live longer/healthier and reduces healthcare costs (I've no idea if that's the case here).
> 'encouraging people to eat healthily' is an attempt to impose a culture
This is a crazy way of looking at it. You might as well have said 100 years ago that education beyond 14 was an imposition on the poor. In a lot of cities in the UK there is an 18 year gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas. Almost 20% of children and 30% of adults in the UK are clinically obese. At some point you have to stop with ideological back and forth and start actually doing something practical.
Too often terms get overloaded - taxation is definitionally an imposition; consumption taxes impose on the poor more than on the rich. Compulsory education is also an imposition.
Whether it's worth doing it anyway is of seperate concern. I don't know a better way.
My personal view is that socialized healthcare is excellent - but the limits it eventually imposes on personal freedom (taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugar, etc etc) are something we should be very careful with.
The main issue as I see it is that I feel that the role of the private sector is to act in a 'one dollar = one vote' manner, whilst the public sector should act in a 'one person = one vote' manner. Consumption taxes break this because they work on the former basis. I think that if we want to discourage bad habits, we should apply the same 'discouragement' to both the wealthy and the poor.
(Interestingly enough, if we take the standpoint that sugary drinks are a net negative to health, then it makes sense from an economic point of view to expend more effort on wealthy consumers of sugary drinks, because they presumably are able to convert health into taxes at a higher rate...)
I have to be honest and wonder exactly how much a sugar tax would actually affect here. I mean, as someone actually living in the UK, the issue (if there is one) is that the prices for sugary drinks are literally at rock bottom; you can get a cheap litre or so of lemonade for about 15 pence. Doubling that price is pretty much going to be completely useless at actually making a difference.
As for whether it's class focused... well, the other BBC article on the matter says that only milk and pure fruit juices are exempt, along with the smallest companies/producers:
So it probably will hit the likes of Starbucks and Costa as much as the likes of Coca Cola and Pepsi. Whether it makes a difference there... probably not. It's like the bag charge, fairly useless to a lot of people.
As for the other taxes... some seem decent enough, though the tax cuts aimed at higher earners is as ridiculous as ever.
this really wasn't a surprise, but it sure gives the press a different headline tomorrow than "another round of austerity" or "it's just not working".
not to mention, and to my utter horror, all schools in England will be turned into academies, and in doing so pass out of public hands into private ownership. A naked landgrab. Fucking disgusting.
Austerity? It looks like they're raising the threshold for the top tax rate, lowering the corporate tax rate, and lowering the capital gains tax rate. That sounds like neoconservative trickle-down economics with handouts to the richest to me rather than belt tightening.
Academies are self-governing non-profit charitable trusts and may receive additional support from personal or corporate sponsors, either financially or in kind
private providers (read companies) and charities. it's already happened to thousands of schools. in 2010 there were around 200. five years 3/4 of secondary are academies, but overwhelming majority of primary schools are not.
I'm not sure that's so bad. I thought 'private' made it for profit, but there are lots of Universities that are run under this type of structure.
Is anything wrong with it? I don't get it, they still get government funding & don't need to get sponsors even though they can? The issue is that the assets are transferred to these trusts and they don't follow the local education authority..
It removes them from local government control, which can have good or bad effects. In terms of oversight, the authority is moved from the local government (ultimately chosen by the local voting public), to the nonprofit's board of trustees (ultimately chosen by... well, usually themselves).
The hoped-for good outcome is that they'll be run by competent technocrats who will do a good job while being insulated from politics. The worried-about bad outcome is that entities with no democratic oversight can end up captured by their administrators, and drift increasingly away from the needs/wants of the local population.
In practice, the national government retains some kind of oversight of UK academies, in part because it controls most of their budget. So they can't completely go off into doing whatever they want. But local government no longer does. So another way of looking at it is that the move represents a centralization of educational oversight, removing oversight power from local government authorities and investing it in the national Department for Education instead. In my personal opinion that's the wrong direction; I'd rather have schools be more locally run.
this effectively privatises our schools and means that the local education authority has no oversight - as far as i am concerned that's bloody insane. being "beholden" to local authorities means we can see how finances are being spent and have public accountability. you will not get that when there's no obligation of the provider to do so.
if it were some product falling through that cracks, who the hell would care, but that's some kids future.
I had a look at this a bit more thoroughly over the past day. It's certainly not as bad as it's made out to be.
I spoke to a couple of brit teachers and they say it lets them use their own teaching ideas & get more teachers (apparently no one wants to be a teacher).
So i'm guessing it can improve schools dramatically as well as make them worse. It can improve them, though.
Weird combination of tax hikes and cuts. I would guess this is more about making the numbers in the budget add up by raising some revenue from "alternative" tax sources, but who knows.
Taxes to be cut: top-rate capital gains, corporation tax, income tax for some brackets
Taxes to be raised: tobacco duty, soda duty, tax on insurance
Yep. I'm as depressed as I expected to be by this budget. And I'm lucky enough to fall into the "personally benefits from these policies" group, can only imagine how much more I would fucking hate that man if his evil policies directly affected me. Urgh.
But is it really? CA puts lottery money into the school fund. But then, every year, they vote to reduce the school fund by exactly the amount the lottery covers. So the lottery balance ends up in the general fund instead.
For those interested in how the sugar tax might affect things going forward, the NBER did an early study on the effects of the sugar tax on Mexico [0].
For a soda tax to work and reduce consumption, the price for soda must rise.
The cost of the taxed drinks, indeed, sharply rose.
The cost of the other untaxed drinks that were caloric substitutes, like juice or milk, did not go up. This suggests that people were not just substituting soft drinks for other high calorie drinks.
Early results suggest that the tax may achieve its goal of weight loss, but it is too early to tell.
Seems counterintuitive to tax something that you are subsidizing.
Start by getting rid of the subsidies and that will naturally raise the price. Effectively it is the same thing but it is fairer and less administrative hassle for the government.
Sugar has a much easier to measure impact on health - dental hygeine and obesity.
The thing about British teeth? It's sort of true. Tooth extraction is a leading cause of child hospitalisation. (Most common cause for children between 5 and 9).
> A report by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) published earlier this year showed tooth decay was the most common reason five to nine-year-olds were admitted to hospital.
> Approximately 46,500 children and young people under 19 were admitted to hospital with tooth decay in 2013-14, with 25,812 in the five to nine age group, a 14% increase since 2010-11.
Yes, British teeth could be better but they're not actually as bad as people think - http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6543.long shows on average in the US kids are missing more teeth than in the UK, for instance
Also, many countries tax alcohol heavily to keep the consumption in check. The topic can be debated, but it does have a direct positive effect on public health, domestic violence, and untimely deaths.
If I remember correctly an ordinary men got choked to death by NYC cops for suspicion of selling cigarettes on streets. Not only that death became an icon of sort for police brutality and racial tensions, it also underlined how many lives the law probably has destroyed. I am not even sure if that is trade-off I would like to make.
In countries like India it is even worse. Increased taxes on mass manufactured cigars means more and more people take to hand made cigars which are far worse than nicotine as they give out lot more of CO.
Also add to it the compliance cost of various cigar related laws and problems it has created for otherwise perfectly normal citizens who probably don't even smoke.
Case in point is of Eric Garner[1] who got killed by NYC cops because they thought he was selling loose cigarette. This is an extreme case that got media attention but I am pretty sure NY cops harass people all the time for such laws.
Everyone on HN probably agrees that marijuana ban has done more harm than good. If total ban is 1 then increasing taxes is probably 0.5 where 0 is totally unregulated. It is a step in wrong direction.
And in the form of principle I would argue that it is not government's job to manipulate our opinions and values of life.
Almost everyone on HN agrees that Apple should not cave in under FBI pressure. What if government increases tax on iPhones because they are encrypted ?
People know that "smoking is bad and increases risk of death", but most people have no idea just how bad or why.
The public health message of "smoking is harmful" hasn't changed much over the past twenty years. The amounts of tax and the prohibitions on smoking in public buildings have.
I suspect it's a class issue: politicians see soda as something that poor, obese people drink, but a white chocolate mocha is not.