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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.'"
Dr. Bibbins-Domingo credits the taxation of tobacco products with being the sole cause of decreased smoking. But it seems to me that I grew up with no desire to try cigarettes after spending my childhood watching PSA after PSA pointing out that it would cause all sorts of horrible diseases. Taxation never figured into it for me...and it also seems that taxation only matters after you're hooked on cigarettes, too. I smoke cigars occasionally, but whatever added cost comes from the taxes don't matter, since it's a rare occurrence. The taxes would matter only if I were regularly spending money on them, like habitual cigarette smokers do. And I've seen how hard it is for smokers to stop, once they are hooked...it's incredibly hard. So I doubt that taxation was the main cause of the decrease in smoking.
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"because ten minutes from now they'll switch to cheap artificially sweetened drinks that are cancerous."
please name a study that actual shows they are cancerous.
There is no good evidence of that.
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I understand the sentiment of not needing the government to tell us what to buy, but I am really tired of the myth that "artificial" sweeteners cause cancer and "natural" sugar is somehow safe. Consuming sugar is known to greatly increase your risk of obesity (and thereby a host of other health issues like heart disease and diabetes). Whereas the least safe of all of the no calorie or low calorie sweeteners in use, aspartame, has not been demonstrated to be a carcinogen at all.
Even if there is a clear line between "natural" and "artificial" it does not follow that the former is in any way safe. Much of nature is out to kill you.
That's your fault for voting for policies that require you to pay for those people. There's something tyrannical about using the majority to force people to accept healthcare from you, then using the healthcare you forced them to accept as a tool to change their behavior.
In what world do most obese children "choose" to be fat? Most children are unaware of the nuances of dieting, the dangers of obesity, and the difficulty in losing weight once gained. They don't choose their parents or the culture they're born into either.
"The rest of us" shouldn't have to pay for anybody's choices. How about everybody pays for their own healthcare expenses? Gosh, what a concept!
Tell me how well that works out for you when you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment out of pocket.
We have insurance to spread the risk, not to encourage people to take stupid risks and make intentionally bad choices.
Just to be sure we're clear -- are you saying you want to live somewhere the emergency rooms turn people away?
I'm not really sure that it's fair to characterize "ensuring that the costs of the choices have would-be externalities incorporated rather than passed on to others" as "removing the choices". Does make a better sound bite, though.
Ok, then actually, we need to turn things around and tax people who try to live longer. No, seriously, the big cost in healthcare is end of life care. It is when you are old and everything just starts going wrong, particularly when you start suffering from mental problems like dementia. THAT'S what really costs. A guy who dies at 60 of a heart attack from being obese? Saved everyone a ton of money. Yes, during his life he cost more than someone who was in very good health, but by not living in to his 80s he saved a ton of money net.
This is all never mind retirement pay. It would be easy to fix SS if most people started dying before they needed to collect it. It could just pay out for disability, and for the rare retirement.
So if you want the taxes to align with the costs, then healthy living is what is going to be taxed. Those that do things that would lead to them living the longest will pay the highest taxes because they are the ones who are likely to cost the most.
If you don't like that idea because you are making the "right" choices, then maybe you need to rethink your premise. Seems to me like people want to "punish" people who they perceive to make the wrong choice, rather than set up something actually based on economics.
So some research, we know what the costs are in healthcare and it is that damn old age and end of life care that pushes it through the roof.
The parents are making them fat to catch sales and save money.
This cut to the heart of why such a tax actually makes economic (and capitalistic) sense at a state level. The cost of these sugary/fattening products is artificially low due to taxpayer money being funneled into the industry at a federal level. Since the farm lobby is too powerful to get that cut it makes sense for states to balance things out and bring such food items at least part of the way back to their real cost.
I work in a hospital system and we do provide for care and regular screening for the poor/indigent. Many of them CHOOSE not to utilize this.
It's certainly not like this everywhere (we are a large not-for-profit system), but saying that they do not have that option available at all is certainly not true. There are also a couple of free clinics with quality doctors that provide free check-ups and basic care in the community as well. This is in a city of about 315k people, for whatever it's worth.
Just another ignorant American.