California City May Tax Sugary Drinks Like Cigarettes

Hugh Pickens writes "Voters in Richmond, California are set to decide in November whether to make the Bay Area city the nation's first municipality to tax soda and other sugary beverages to help fight childhood obesity. The penny-per-ounce tax, projected to raise between $2 million and $8 million, would go to soccer fields, school gardens and programs to treat diabetes and fight obesity. Councilman Jeff Ritterman, a doctor who proposed the measure, says soda is a prime culprit behind high childhood obesity rates in Richmond, where nearly 20 percent of residents live below the poverty line. 'If you look at where most of our added sugar is coming, it's coming from the sugar-sweetened beverages,' says Ritterman. 'It's actually a poison for you, because your liver can't handle that huge amount of fructose.' Not everyone is pleased by the proposed license fee on businesses selling sweetened drinks. It would require owners of bodegas, theaters, convenience stores and other outlets to tally ounces sold and, presumably, pass the cost on to customers. Soda taxes have failed elsewhere — most notably in Philadelphia, where Mayor Michael A. Nutter's attempts to impose a 2-cents-per-ounce charge on sugary drinks have sputtered twice. However, Dr. Bibbins-Domingo says similar taxes on cigarettes have had a dramatic effect on public health. 'It was a few decades ago when we had high rates of tobacco and we had high rates of tobacco-related illnesses. Those measures really turned the tide and really led to lower rates of tobacco across the country.'"

Comments

Re:What a terrible idea

[elucido]

Much like taxing cigarettes. If cigarettes are so bad for the individual (as the government states - and anyone with a fucking brain knows) why is the government in the cigarette business? And try to be honest with yourself - the government is in the cigarette business when they make 20x the profit on a pack, compared to the cigarette company.

Taxing soda won't do anything but hand over more money to the government. It won't stop a thing and people know it.

Want to stop children drinking soda? then simply make it illegal for them to do so. (Which I don't agree with)

California has universal healthcare. Sick people cost more money than healthy people which means your taxes go up paying for smokers and soda drinkers. Make them pay the extra dollar and suddenly they have to pay for their own bad habits.

People should pay for their choices

[elucido]

If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses. The tax allows the government to charge the people who are running up the healthcare expenses and this is an excellent idea for a state which provides universal coverage.

The people with the bad habits should shut up and pay the tax or better maybe the government can simply cut them off healthcare entirely and let them die? Which is it? All I know is the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for their choices.

Re:People should pay for their choices

[AthanasiusKircher]

If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses.

I keep hearing this crap and seeing it modded up as "+5 Informative."

Here's the problem with these arguments: Study: Fat people cheaper to treat.

This is a problem with the majority of health care expense studies that call for "nanny state" approaches to just about anything. Such studies usually compare annual costs to treat people who have various conditions or behaviors. Rarely do they consider total expenses for the entire lifespans of patients.

Think about it this way: an obese or a smoker or whatever may get sick a little more and thus cost a little more on average for the early part of his/her life. But a lot of these people then have heart attacks or strokes or whatever and die at age 45 or 55 or whatever. Meanwhile, other healthy people continue living to age 85 or 90, and they need health care (including various illnesses, operations, whatever) for an extra 30 or 40 years more. In the end, even many "healthy lifestyle" people will die of cancer or some other costly illness, so they end up costing the system a lot of money in the last couple years of care, just like the obese smoker who ends up with lung cancer 30 years earlier.

But those extra 30 years of healthcare, even for healthy people, will often end up costing more than the obese person who was "nice enough" to die and remove himself from the insurance pool early.

The cost-benefit analysis is a bit controversial, and there are some conflicting studies, but basically when you consider the total cost of healthcare over an entire lifespan, that obese smoker probably costs everyone a little less -- or at least about the same amount.

You can apply this logic to just about any "nanny state" law. Seat belt laws supposedly save us money because people wearing seatbelts end up with fewer major injuries, thereby costing the healthcare system less. But those studies never take into account the fact that people who don't wear seat belts tend to have a much greater fatality rate, and every 18-year-old dumbass who gets himself killed without a seatbelt is someone the healthcare system won't have to treat for another 60 or 70 years.

In the end, most of these things tend to balance out... because people who do stupid things just don't live as long and therefore generally shave decades off of their healthcare costs.

You want to be angry about someone -- be angry with the 100+ year old healthy people who have had minor operations and other problems over the years. They're the ones who collectively are costing you huge amounts of money over their lifespans. Maybe you're in favor of cutting off health insurance for anyone who lives past the average lifespan??

Re:It's not a tax, it's an improvement

[codewarren]

From that link:

But critics charged that the investigators did not follow the guidelines for scientific study outlined by the NIEHS' own research group, the National Toxicology Program. They further noted that the NTP's own animal studies involving similar levels of aspartame exposure showed no link between the sweetener and an increase in cancers

Re:It's not a tax, it's an improvement

[Penguinisto]

Here you go:

"Conclusions: Smoking was associated with structural, material as well as perceived dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage. "

http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/3/262.full

And before you say it, here's one focused on the US instead of the EU:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/american-smokers-and-income-charted/

Re:It's not a tax, it's an improvement

[cayenne8]

I don't think that means what you think it means:

"The United States Constitution contains two references to "the General Welfare", one occurring in the Preamble and the other in the Taxing and Spending Clause. It is only the latter that is referred to as the "General Welfare Clause" of this document. These clauses in the U.S. Constitution are exceptions to the typical use of a general welfare clause, and are not considered grants of a general legislative power to the federal government as the U.S. Supreme Court has held:

the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution "has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments"; and,

prior to 1936, the General Welfare Clause was not considered an independent grant of power, but instead a qualification on the taxing power which included within it a power to spend tax revenues in the interest of the general welfare. In recent decades, the Court conferred upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to its own discretion, including the power to indirectly coerce the states into adopting national standards by threatening to withhold federal funds. (This was a huge mistake, IMHO)

Thomas Jefferson explained the latter general welfare clause for the United States: "The laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised.

They [Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. "