> On a particularly dumb note, ciders are limited by law to 0.64g per 100ml, or 3.2 volumes. Above that level they cease being ciders and instead become a sparkling wine. This is very important because natural cider is taxed at $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at $3.30 or $3.40 per gallon depending on how the carbonation is added. This is a difference of roughly 30 cents per standard bottle, or $1.79 per six pack; enough of a difference to make similar products more attractive on the market place shelf.
I've seen this with chocolate too. The definition of chocolate in the UK and EU apparently requires one of the ingredients to be sugar, making sugar-free chocolate unable to be called chocolate unless it actually contains sugar. A friend of mine runs a keto chocolate company and he has to include a small amount of coconut sap to actually be allowed to market it as chocolate, even though he's trying to minimise carbohydrate content.
On the one hand, this seems a rather silly law, but on the other hand, how else do you define what a particular product is? Is it down to how it's marketed? Because then companies will just market it as something else that still hints it's the thing it's not, to avoid the tax and potentially gain more price-conscious customers.
> A problem with malternatives has been the need to find ways to mask the beer-like flavor that results from brewing. To that end, these drinks have added sugar and strong citrus flavors, which a lot of consumers like.
Nice! Our tax laws encourage companies to make less palatable goods that then require more added sugar to compensate thus upping everyone's carbohydrate intake without it actually tasting as good as those carbs would be in a cake or some such. How wonderful! /s
> Practically overnight it became impossible to buy drinks containing more sugar than the tax minimum limit. It wasn't illegal to sell them, but no corporation would waste money on a silly thing like taste.
Oh yes. Poland introduced a sugar tax recently, and I've never seen so many low-sugar offerings in the shops in my life. Marketing people of course got to work spinning this; a well-known brand of fruity beverages that advertises to children suddenly started highlighting how their products are healthy for children because they're sugar free. That's despite the fact that until few months earlier, they were the symbol of sugar-full beverages for children.
This is to say, profit motive is reality and sanity-bending, it should definitely be put to use through carbon taxation.
> However, HFCS make up ~3.5% of the cost of a soft drink, and the cost of corn is less than half the total cost of making HFCS, which means the total impact of corn subsidies on the price of a soft drink is a couple of pennies.
The actual cost of manufacturing a soft drink is in the order of pennies - [0] does a breakdown where the numbers are likely wrong but in the right ballpark. An increase of a few c per litre in tax at the production level would have a huge knock on effect on the price of the drinks, unless the manufacturers eat the increases.
Customers are also hugely price sensitive, an increase of a few pence can have a massive change on purchasing patterns.
> It'll be like the sugar tax in Norway. Do you really think people are buying less sugar over here because of it? Get real!
I can't speak for Norway, but in the UK the sugar tax has had a huge impact - a _majority_ of soft drink manufacturers have significantly reduced sugar in their products, to avoid them becoming unaffordable, and it's had a very noticeable effect.
The UK tax is still pretty new so it's difficult to get hard numbers on that, but sugar taxes in general are fairly well studied and have been very effective worldwide. https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.603 has a good summary, some highlights:
* "Overall 21.6% decrease in the monthly purchased volume of the higher taxed, sugary soft drinks"
* "People living in Philadelphia were 40% less likely to report consuming sugary drinks every day after the tax policy"
* "Mexico's 10% tax on sugar-sweetened beverages implemented in January 2014 is said to have led to a 5.5% drop in sugary drinks purchases by the end of that year and a further 9.7% fall in sales in 2015, yielding an average reduction of 7.6% over the study two-year period"
To effect the largest impact with the smallest policy change. Bakers aren't going to oppose a tax on sugary drinks, but would oppose a tax on baked goods. Further, why try to change a behavior that isn't significantly contributing to the problem?
> The real reason for targeting sugary drinks vs. fancy patisserie is...
I don't think you can assert this so definitively. Just because you can't think of another reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
>is that it just results in said people cutting their budget to afford the tax, making their life worse overall.
This is a general problem with regressive taxes (eg. sales taxes). The way to mitigate this is to give some fixed amount back to everyone. It can even be made fully revenue neutral (ie. all collected revenues are returned as a tax credit). That way, people are still incentivized to stop consuming sugary products, people aren't left with a hole in their wallets if they don't change their habits.
>Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal
I'm not sure how this would work. Maybe they will stop adding sugar directly, but they might something that's 90% sugar (eg. apple juice concentrate). We already see this play out in nitrite-containing foods. Basically what happened was that nitrites in food was found to be bad for your health, so food companies switched from adding nitrites directly to adding "celery juice extract", which is a natural source of nitrites. Nothing really changed, except now there's no "nitrites" in the label, and the company can call it "all-natural".
> The solution is to tax added sugar (including for sub-ingredients) per gram, and a flat tax for any food containing artificial sweeteners. 1c per gram of sugar, or 20% for anything containing artificial sweeteners seems reasonable.
A sugar tax would mostly impact the people who have the least choice in what they buy, due to poverty and/or the availability of healthier foods. (See: food deserts)
Better to work on the affordability and availability of healthy food than try to penalize people for buying stuff that's cheap and ubiquitous. If you want to apply sticks, apply them to large retailers like Wal-mart and Target instead of to individuals.
> No doubt people will arrive shortly to knee-jerk against sugary drink taxes; but would they mind explaining why sugar is made artificially cheap to start with?
It's a bit more complicated than that. US agricultural policy subsidises corn production (driving prices down), but US trade policy keeps cheap sugar out of the country, while US energy policy diverts corn into making biofuels, both of which drive prices back up. It's not clear what the net effect is.
Even the impact of corn subsidies alone does not seem to be enormous, however. Some estimates have corn subsidies driving the cost of corn down by ~27%, with flow on effects to the prices of meat, dairy, and yes, HFCS. However, HFCS make up ~3.5% of the cost of a soft drink, and the cost of corn is less than half the total cost of making HFCS, which means the total impact of corn subsidies on the price of a soft drink is a couple of pennies.
In other words, if we wanted a sugary drink tax to counteract the impact of corn subsidies in the US, it would probably need to be on the order of 1-2%. Would a 1% tax have any measurable impact on consumption? Unlikely.
Meanwhile, Australia has no subsidies, mostly uses sugar (and not HFCS) but has the same obesity patterns as the US. Analysis of obesity and agricultural policy across countries finds no trends.
> This had the side effect of sugar being a cheaper food ingredient than most of the alternatives, even in countries that didn't directly import HFCS (since the US was no longer removing as much raw sugar from the market, driving down costs).
Only in the short term; that effect would have ended years ago. The global price of sugar now is driven by the marginal cost of production in Brazil, mostly. Americans don't consume (much) imported sugar, but they also don't export much HFCS, and most of what they do export goes to a single country (Mexico). There's no glut of "sugar the US would have consumed" on the market.
Second, global sugar prices have been pretty flat for the last 20 years; I don't think your link 3 is really showing what you say. You can poke at the chart here: https://www.macrotrends.net/2537/sugar-prices-historical-cha... but I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing.
> Nobody needs kale or skateboards either... Why not tax them to "what the market will bear"?
Because alcohol and tobacco have "negative externalities" to society. These would be mainly health related but I guess the discussion on this post is also around behavioural issues.
By adding a tax to a product, you can make the consumers and manufacturers together share the burden of paying off the externality, (e.g. care for lung cancer patients) and/or the tax will often discourage consumption in the first place. (The second being more applicable in the US where there is limited/no universal healthcare)
The reason you probably wouldn't tax kale, is because it's good for you, and if anything; you could say it has a "positive externality" in that consuming it makes you healthier, and thus benefits society. So it might make sense to actual SUBSIDISE kale production... although this may have very different effects from taxing unhealthy food.
>Conflict of interest but its interesting to note both Coke and Pepsi also own major juice brands and these get a free pass most of the time when laws are crafted to reduce intake of sugary food.
To play devil's advocate, one reason you might want to exempt "natural fruit juices" from a "soda tax" laws is that the laws are designed to make the product more expensive, enough to scare off consumption into healthier alternatives. But natural fruit juices tend to already be much more expensive to begin with (because you have to actually grow the few pieces of fruit), so they already have a kind of built-in deterrent to overconsumption.
> 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].
> 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.
> 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.
> Pollution tax: yes; you are being taxed for affecting others. Soda tax: no; you are hurting no one but yourself, and it is a stretch to say otherwise.
In this case you should consider: who is hurting whom? The research of Ariely and the experimental results of the marketing industry have made it clear that your choice to buy soda is not simply a transaction between yourself and the grocery store. It involves the government’s need for cheap calories to prevent social unrest, and it involves the sugar industry’s ongoing efforts to keep carbohydrate overloads socially acceptable. Soda is the industry hurting you.
I think there should be in Canada because we have a public health care system and the effects of sugar intake puts stresses on public health care, and those that who binge on sugar should be forced to pay for their higher costs on public health - I should not be subsiding their preventable issues.
I've seen this with chocolate too. The definition of chocolate in the UK and EU apparently requires one of the ingredients to be sugar, making sugar-free chocolate unable to be called chocolate unless it actually contains sugar. A friend of mine runs a keto chocolate company and he has to include a small amount of coconut sap to actually be allowed to market it as chocolate, even though he's trying to minimise carbohydrate content.
On the one hand, this seems a rather silly law, but on the other hand, how else do you define what a particular product is? Is it down to how it's marketed? Because then companies will just market it as something else that still hints it's the thing it's not, to avoid the tax and potentially gain more price-conscious customers.
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