How much are sodas taxed in Seattle? Maybe I missed something but I couldn't find it in the article. Does the soda tax go towards increasing public health services in the region?
It is a sugar tax, not a soda tax. All drinks, that are sweetened with a caloric sugar based sweetener that are not milk based, are taxed. There are a few other exceptions such as alcohol, 100% fruit juice and anything with calories fewer than 40 per 120 ozs.
The majority of the proceeds are supposed to go into expanding access to healthy food a well as education, asking other things
Armed with three years of grocery shopping data, researchers found that total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases. This isn't the right definition of success. The first minimal requirement for this to be a successful initiative is that the community lost weight overall. Or even gained weight, but more slowly than other communities. If they could prove that it would be a…
A tax on sugar's job is to reduce sugar sales. So it's the right metric to see if the tax itself is doing what it's supposed to do. What you seem to be arguing is on a metric of if the tax should have been implemented in the first place. i.e. If the actual goal was reducing weight, then the obvious thought is all weight increasers should be taxed, not just sugar.
The proponents of the law claimed they were doing it to fight obesity, to reduce weight.
But considering that a per ounce metric is probably the wrong thing, and they didn't tax the worst drink, the milkshake, they didn't really do this to attack obesity.
I love that they need evidence for "taxation works". It doesn't take a prophet to tell if you charge $10 for a can of soda, sales decline. The question is how much can we tax
Had increasing the tax on cigarettes caused people to buy fewer cigarettes?
Because 55.88% of voters (1,721,487 people) voted for it. Note that the initiative banned "local government entities from imposing any new tax, fee, or other assessment on grocery items" in general, not just from sugary drinks. I guess people did not want more expensive groceries. This may in the future be compensated by more expensive healthcare, but such is the human species. Short term gain > long term loss.
Just for some perspective, in some states there is zero tax on any food because it is seen as essential. The problem is there are a lot of assumptions being made about the choice to buy a soda in any given situation. Someone in my family, for example, has type 1 diabetes, and occasionally (not usually; they control it well) needs something sugary for weird situations to regulate their blood sugar. On average the stat…
Washington state has a candy tax.
And like most places has a tax on prepared food but not unprepared for.
This is an article that suggests the pro-tax side of the argument never came to understand the anti-tax side. Possibly the anti-tax side were being misleading about their complaints. Of course a soda tax will reduce the amount of soda consumed and there was a decent chance it would reduce the amount of sugar too. And if there is a goal to achieve, keep raising the tax until it does what you want. The problem with thi…
Personally I was against this stupid tax. Of course I drink Coca-cola. But the main reason is because it doesn't really do what they want it to do.
It raises a can of coke 20 cents. A glass at the restaurant about 25 cents (of course a glass goes up by that much every year it seems.) As a Coke drinker I would barely see this tax.
On the other hand if I drank sweetened ice tea, it works more than double the cost. In fact the less sugar a drink has, the more this tax works increase it, on a percentage basis. Which is ridiculous. What is worse, the funk that has the most calories per ounce, a milkshake, is exempt. Alcohol, also with a high calorie count is also exempt.
I love that they need evidence for "taxation works". It doesn't take a prophet to tell if you charge $10 for a can of soda, sales decline. The question is how much can we tax
Had increasing the tax on cigarettes caused people to buy fewer cigarettes?
if I say I know, it would be a lie, but why not? What happened instead?
I love that they need evidence for "taxation works". It doesn't take a prophet to tell if you charge $10 for a can of soda, sales decline. The question is how much can we tax
Had increasing the tax on cigarettes caused people to buy fewer cigarettes?
From the smokers I talked with yes. I know one guy switched to vaping because it was much cheaper (and, even though we won't know it for another 30 or so years, much less unhealthy).