I imagine part of the strategy should be to use the funds from the tax to counter the negative effects of the product.
This was an effective strategy for smoking. Stopping ads for soda, and similarly producing ads that inform people of the risks of high amounts of soda consumption with the tax.
Over here in the EU these taxes are specifically designed not to reduce consumption.
The relation between a tax and consumption is not linear. Below a certain treshold there is 0 consumption impact. In fact, taxes need to be rather huge to change behaviour especially for addictive/craving substances. We learned those lessons many decades ago with the tobacco industry.
It's so hard to find drinks, portable snacks, and similar that are in the 3-8% sugar range with no artificial sweetener to make them inedibly sweet. You finally find one and a few weeks later the sugar doubles or it is replaced with 5x the sweetness in erithrotol
Just x g of sugar, and y equivalent grams of sweetener on the front in a standard format.
I juice my own lemons, limes and grapefruit and mix each with seltzer water for really tasty beverages. Bananas, apricots, and home made trail mix cover the snacks. If you use a nutrition site and work with what you might have in bulk in a nearby store, you can make some very balanced snacks, and you're entirely in control of the portions.
This all takes very little time. I'm honestly mad it took me 40 years to just do this instead of buying "premade" anything.
⇒ I expect they would like to see something like “39 REAL”, respectively “40 ARTIFICIAL” on the label.
Of course there’s a can of worms in that there are multiple ‘real’ sugars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar) and producers will try to talk down that 200, but I think that’s solvable.
What’s less solvable is that producers will talk down the unit size used to compute the amount of sugar, just as they do with the unit size used to compute the number of calories.
Alternatively, this could be shown as a sweetness rating with “x% artificial” added, or just as a sweetness rating alongside the existing ‘calories’ rating.
> Of course there’s a can of worms in that there are multiple ‘real’ sugars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar) and producers will try to talk down that 200, but I think that’s solvable.
Total grams of sugar per 100 and total sweeteners equivalent to y grams of sucrose per 100 when both are dissolved in water would suffice.
That allows comparing relative sweetness of drinks, but runs the risk of consumers, seeing “1g per 100ml”, will say “there’s only 1g of sugar in this drink” and then gulp down a bottle of the stuff.
If the typical consumer drinks the stuff in bottle sizes, maybe the dietary information on the bottle should use ‘per bottle’.
That's the kind of idiotic logic that leads to a 600ml bottle or a 60g bag of chips being '2 servings'.
The relevant question is 'how sugary is this substance'. With a secindary question of 'how sweet is it' to set expectations for people who want somet=ing sweet or peoplewho don't. Give people the basic level of respect to decide how much they have after that.
Drinks like iced teas or watered down fruit drink or 'vitamin water' around that level were common in australia, but one by one are going from being the less cloyingly sweet options to being the most via other sweeteners. Usually one ariund the 5% sugar range will get extremely popular because it is actually slightly different, then get bought out or price dumped out of existence by coca cola followed by being focuse grouped into being exactly the same as all the others and falling into obscurity.
There's usually one or two items on the muesli/nut/cake bar shelf, but you have to read the nutrition info for half of them every time to find it.
This must be the only time a tax didn't reduce use of the thing being taxed. The USA can't raise tax rate on capital gains lest we kill all investment. We lowered the business tax rate just a few years ago so as to keep businesses from fleeing the country.
It's just plain weird that this tax didn't have the desired effect. I sense an economics doctoral dissertation!
No mention of the fact that this study mixes data that was conducted prior to the pandemic with data collected during the height of the pandemic. Casually, it associates a small tax with TREMENDOUS reduction?
> Bleich et al. (2021) similarly found a 42% decrease (6.1 fL oz decrease) in purchases of taxed beverages in Philadelphia
> found Philadelphia experienced a far larger decline than the other four cities using a consumer panel from the marketing firm Infoscout.
> In Philadelphia, Zhong et al. (2018) used a phone survey and found that within 2 months of the tax's implementation
This is bad science, even when it's only a meta-analysis (which necessarily has a lower bar).
This study is flawed in that it didn’t account for purchase increases outside the survey area.
In Chicago the tax was ineffective as there were many close municipalities without the tax - in addition to grey market stores that didn’t charge the tax - allowing buyers to easily avoid paying it.
The article talks about why: it does reduce the consumption of soda pop, but people substitute the sugar intake by consuming other sugary foods. They also travel to neighboring towns without the tax.
It's also about competition. Global business operates isn a highly competitive market where capital gains tax rates will be closely compared. But taxing soda when it's between ten brands by Coke/Pepsi vs Water. People aren't going to water for just 10c more (or w/e the tax is).
I'd imagine with illegal addictive drugs when prices increase 10-20% it won't stop buyers since they are already making a guilty-pleasure/poor choice so a slightly worse one isn't much of a bigger deal.
Some product and service categories operate under different dynamics than most things.
> The article talks about why: it does reduce the consumption of soda pop, but people substitute the sugar intake by consuming other sugary foods. They also travel to neighboring towns without the tax.
It's also entirely inconsistent; in Boulder they tax the normal stuff like coke and sprite but will exempt for San Peligrino but then also tax Oceanspray juice. Personally, I've always thought it was a lot like the pervasive green-washing that takes place there as an additional stream of revenue in already bloated bureaucratic system.
I only ever drank kombucha or Water from the SafewayKingsoopers/WF etc... in town anyhow so it never really affected me; but when I think of just how obtuse it is I start to realize how it's a targeted tax on those with poor diets with no real discernible metric for success, it's merely there to self-perpetuate a bad system as poorer people will continue to eat poorly with less expendable income to buy better products as a result of the tax.
The US is obese, and despite Boulder being the time the most healthiest city in the US most of when I lived there it was still clear to see how the economic divide play out where it's most clearest: grocery stores. And it was clear that it was heavily biased to those with larger wages who could fit in 4-5 day workouts per week and the occasional hike and eating from organic sourced restaurants.
If we had a universal healthcare system I would totally be in favour of this, despite being in the lower income level most of time there (boot-strapping founder) I was still on the 'healthiest' demographic but without a clear actionable plan to a desirable end this is one of those 'road to hell are paved with good intention' scenarios.
> in Boulder they tax the normal stuff like coke and sprite but will exempt for San Peligrino but then also tax Oceanspray juice
Assuming they're taxing based on the sugar content, then that's the expected outcome. Coke, Sprite, and juice have sugar in them, sparkling water doesn't.
> Assuming they're taxing based on the sugar content, then that's the expected outcome. Coke, Sprite, and juice have sugar in them, sparkling water doesn't.
But to what end? Those people still ate poorly, and continued to make those poor purchase decisions and had less money to justify making better ones as they didn't miraculously start drinking San Peligrino Italian soda, which also has sugar in them [0].
San Pellegrino without a qualifier typically refers to the sparkling water, not Aranciata; the sparkling water has zero calories. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.Pellegrino
Sure, but having to travel has a cost in both time and money, which is equivalent to a tax, even if it raises no additional direct income for that city.
It had the desired effect. People stopped buying soda in the city. It turns out that what they needed was a sugar tax and that the tax has to be applied on a broader geographic area.
Further, while I support a sugar tax, on public health grounds, I'd much rather we stop subsidizing sugar production (esp HFCS).
But ending subsidies for corn, sugar beets, etc. is still a non-starter. Because Electoral College and US Senate.
So we're stuck with virtual signaling our displeasure towards harmful agricultural policies with impotent measures like soda taxes.
Meanwhile, like this OC suggests, we absolutely should be investing and subsidizing in healthy drinking water. It's CRAZY that people in places like Flint MI and Jackson MS cannot safely consume their own tap water.
The US "anti-subsidy" laws where they put duties on products they deem were government subsidized, while CORN is massively subsidized.
"Subsidies for corn—the most abundant crop in the United States—have far surpassed those for any other crop, estimated to have totaled more than $116 billion since 1995."
One has to question the logic here. Use tax dollars to subsidize the price of corn, which leaves the country awash in HFCS and "ethanol" to find creative ways to get rid of all the corn. Then attempt to tax the HFCS later?
Seems removing the subsidy would cause the price of HFCS to raise but we cant do that due to powerful lobby groups?
These "sugar taxes" always have so many exemptions to feed some special interest groups requirements creating an ever-increasing complex set of laws.
The USA was famously founded on a tax that didn't reduce use of the thing being taxed, nor was it actually designed to. Tax isn't magic, and the devil is always in the details.
Everyone seems to be doing this differently. It makes no sense to not have this apply to candy and cookies.
Look at the nutrition facts label, see how many grams of added sugar there are, and to keep things simple set the the tax at one cent per gram of added sugar. I can't see this being hard to implement.
Or just tax the original sugar production or importation and be done with all the complexity of chasing down a million food companies across thousands of jurisdictions. (Or let people eat whatever they want and stop being a busybody.)
Production is usually not within the jurisdiction of cities (as they are produced elsewhere and shipped there usually), so cities are limited in what they can do. As to busybody, excess sugar consumption is a public health problems that governments should intervene on, as I believe it is right for them to do in areas like tobacco.
What about alcohol? They tax it, sure, but the tax isn’t high enough to discourage consumption. I’ve never heard of anyone getting in a car and killing people after consuming too much sugar.
Alcohol taxes definitively reduces consumption, what makes you think it wouldn't?
It's not one of the extremely rare Giffen goods which defy the laws of supply and demand. Most alcoholic drinks have a substitute in drinks with less (or no) alcohol in them, competing on price. Moreover, people's consumption is affected by how much is considered "normal" to drink (one of the early, solid findings of alcohol epidemiology), so there's a positive feedback amplifying small changes to consumption habits from other things.
It's been a while since I visited BC or Ontario but I recall their liquor and beer taxes led me to purchase less than I had originally planned. I live near the WA/OR border and only buy things in WA that are not available in OR.
I agree with your premise that this should apply to candy and cookies.
I also like your idea of keeping things simple. The hard part, as always, are the edge cases. If the tax is associated directly with sugar in some manner than diet sodas won't be taxed. Another possible albeit silly argument is why not tax sugars in fruit?
Note: Im a software engineer. Not a dietician. I really don't know a detailed difference between artificial sugars and natural sugars or how our bodies process them.
> If the tax is associated directly with sugar in some manner than diet sodas won't be taxed.
Running with this idea, there'll eventually be a federal conversion table where any given chemical would be translated to their mass in sugar. From there, tax calculation's simply:
sum((sugar_conversion_lookup[ingredient] * mass) for ingredient in product) * tax_per_gram_of_sugar
> Another possible albeit silly argument is why not tax sugars in fruit?
Because total sugars and added sugars are not the same thing. It makes more sense to tax added sugars because they are clearly worse, and it strains Medicare/Medicaid budgets.
Sugars are indeed the same thing whether they came from a fruit or were added (up to the type of sugar). And where labelling restrictions are stricter, it's common to use grape or apple juice to increase the sugar content of drinks and still be allowed to write "No added sugars" on the bottle.
I took "tax sugars in fruit" to mean a tax on a whole banana or other whole fruit based on its natural sugar content. It's well-known that the fiber in fruit makes eating the whole fruit much better than drinking fruit juice.
Adding grape juice or apple juice to a snack or drink would still be considered an added sugar on the nutrition label under FDA guidelines[1].
The reason they do that is often to make sure "sugar" isn't the first ingredient in the ingredient list, which have to be listed in decreasing order of weight[2].
Note that the ingredient list and the nutrition facts label are two different things.
Washington State had had a "candy" tax for at least a decade. I put candy on quotes, because some candy is exempt.
But then Seattle added their per ounce sweetened soda tax. The per ounce concept always seemed wrong to me. Because the lower calorie drinks are cheaper but a per ounce tax hits them more.
What is worse is a milk based drink is excempt, so milk shakes, the highest caloric drink isn't taxed.
If these results are correct, I expect it's from terrible lobbyist-butchered implementations like that, where a good substitute product (e.g. sugar free soda) is taxed equally much, or a worse substitute product (e.g milkshakes) avoids the tax.
For anyone 100lbs overweight, suspend insurance coverage (and premiums) unless they are losing 5lbs per month on average for the last 6 months. Weight loss & nutrition counseling are always free.
But I totally agree with you, but how is weight any different than any other voluntarily arrived at (e.g. skin cancer because of no sunscreen and too much sun exposure) "pre-existing conditions" that must be covered?
Obesity may be caused by those 2 things, but those are not the only causes as your post implies.
An example: fast-food companies lobbied the government to allow Snap cards to be used for fast food. A Big Mac Meal costs $6 and contains 1080 calories according to Google. For $6, you can buy 3 cartons of eggs (Indiana). At 78 calories per egg, that's 2808 calories. So you can get 2.5x more calories from a healthy food like eggs rather than shitty food like a Big Mac meal.
I've heard people say "poor people are fatter because good food costs more money than crappy fast food". I don't believe that. I think many people are fat because they don't want to bother going to the grocery store and cooking. It's easier to eat shit food in a box and drink a soda or three.
Why are you arguing some point about cost that I didn't make instead of addressing the points I _did_ make? Incredible that you go through the trouble of building up a straw man when I am standing right here offering an actual argument. I guess it's cheaper than actually engaging with me in earnest. I am thoroughly disappointed.
Food insecurity was determined by response (always/usually/sometimes) to the question,“How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”
I'm arguing about cost because food security in this survey is a cost issue. And, it's important to note that the article only covers 12 states. The Abstract ends with:
"These findings are consistent with previous research and highlight the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults."
My point is, we are instead increasing access for poor people to fast, unhealthy foods that cost more per calorie provided (Big Mac Meals) than healthy food (eggs).
I was pointing out thr current absurd social media trends when people talk about being overweight negatively in any context. This context would be an egregious offense too, regardless of your common sense.
Excuse this rethorical question, but is there any context where being overweight is something positive?
I agree that shaming people for being fat is counterproductive. But dismissing honest attempts at breaking the status quo under the pretense that it is insulting to fat people is really doing them a disservice.
This was an effective strategy for smoking. Stopping ads for soda, and similarly producing ads that inform people of the risks of high amounts of soda consumption with the tax.