A resource for health professionals, parents, teachers, counselors & kids on the childhood obesity epidemic.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, former mayor Mike Nutter used to keep a bottle of soda on his desk, and another container with 17 teaspoons of sugar in it, to illustrate the point that swallowing the one implied ingesting the other. He even took the props to public meetings, and once asked a journalist, “Who in their right mind would ever put this much sugar into something you’re going to drink?”

Insane or not, across America, many voters are against the whole “sin tax” concept. They resist taxes with a “moral subtext” imposed by the “nanny state.” Even politicians who are pretty much on the same side may disagree. During last year’s presidential campaign, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders made headlines by weighing in on the city’s soda tax controversy.

One man reconsiders

Back when Mayor Nutter wanted a 2-cents-per-ounce soda tax, Jim Kenney was one of the city council members who opposed it. But after becoming mayor himself, Kenney switched sides, acquiring a new, supportive, and exclusively revenue-based attitude.

Mayor Kenney did not tell voters that drinking less sugar would be good for them and their children, but pointed out that $400 million in the next five years would be a sweet little nest egg to finance preschools, and to renovate public spaces, including parks and recreation centers, which at least have some connection with obesity prevention. Still, the mayor’s endorsement was unabashedly “based on the idea that a soda tax is just an untapped source of revenue,” as journalist Zeeshan Aleem put it.

How much difference does it make? A public official’s genuine attitude is a difficult variable to influence or control. Nothing can make them care about children’s health. But all public officials are supposed to care about spending tax revenues sensibly, and about bringing in more money. If they favor the soda tax for that reason, how much should their motivation matter, as long as the thing gets done?

A false equivalency

People wondered why passing a soda tax was so difficult. After all, Berkeley, California, had managed to do it. But Berkeley is a smallish city on the West Coast, while Philadelphia is big, tough, and sits on a lot of history.

Their situations are not the same, as Jacob Sullum explains: What initially appeared to be an altruistic effort to “save poor people from their own bad habits” was in Philadelphia admittedly only a money grab. He writes:

Unlike Berkeley, where voters approved a one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened drinks in 2014, Philadelphia will tax low-calorie and zero-calorie beverages at the same rate as regular soda. In fact, the tax of one-and-a-half cents per ounce could perversely encourage consumption of more calories, especially since it does not apply to juice products loaded with naturally occurring sugar.

How did this happen?

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Philadelphia soda tax experiment,” RoyalGazette.com, 08/04/16
Source: “Philadelphia’s Mayor Proposes the Highest Soda Tax in the U.S., But Not to Improve Health,” Mic.com, 04/15/16
Source: “Philadelphia’s New Soda Tax Has Nothing to Do With Obesity,” Reason.com, 06/17/16
Photo credit: Shardayyy via Visualhunt/CC BY

The financial entity known as Bank of America Merrill Lynch advised its constituents of the many juicy opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors who wish to “play the global fight-against-obesity theme.” Many countries around the world have instituted, or at least talked about, taxes on fat, sugar, and high-calorie foods. However — and this is the message — even without selling sweetened fizzy water any manufacturer who is savvy enough to jump on the health bandwagon can still make a killing.

As we have seen, the Coca-Cola Company led the way in demonstrating adaptability to the health movement. Coke pioneered such workarounds as peddling sugar-laden drinks in smaller containers. The strategy turned out to be even more profitable than what they had been doing before. This, by the way, is a perfect example of what a money-worshipping corporation means, when it talks about creating choice for the consumer.

If results are any clue, people are already offered more choice than is good for them. What is the benefit of having 1,500 kinds of soda if they are all equally damaging to the health?

Shots fired

The idea of a soda tax popped up sporadically, here and there across the country, but never quite caught on, until the West Coast showed leadership. Journalist Lizzie Wade wrote:

In November 2014, Measure D, a one-cent-per-ounce soda tax, was passed by Berkeley, California voters with a 76 percent plurality, becoming the first soda tax referendum to be implemented in the U.S.

As always, opinions differed. A lot of academically-oriented people had a horse in this race, and so did the corporate-minded ones.

Marion Nestle, who literally wrote the book on this issue — titled Soda Politics — would have been better pleased if the social experiment of taxing fizzy drinks could have more defined edges. As it was, soda consumption had been going down anyway, especially in Berkeley, so the effect of the new tax would not be clear cut.

There was also the matter of “leakage,” which is what happens when tax-avoiding consumers simply go to a nearby city (like Oakland or San Francisco) to stock up on soda pop. Bruce Y. Lee pointed out that Berkeley is a smallish, not-major city with “a much smaller lower-income population and potentially fewer people who use cost as a deciding factor of whether to drink soda.” For these and other reasons, proponents worried that whatever data eventually emerged from Berkeley’s experiment would not have much bearing on the possibilities for other cities.

Even the American Beverage Association weighed in with a warning that Berkeley was too small to base any conclusions on, and besides, its “high median income and low baseline consumption rates make it a challenging place to determine the true impact of a beverage tax…” As the old saying goes, even the Devil can quote scripture.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “A fat investment opportunity,” Moneyweb.co.za, 04/16/15
Source: “Mexico’s Soda Tax Is Working. The US Should Learn From It,” Wired.com, 07/13/15 Source: “In a devastating blow to the beverage industry, four cities passed soda taxes,” Vox.com, 11/09/16
Source: “In Berkeley, Soda Tax Is Doing What It’s Supposed To Do,” Forbes.com, 04/18/17
Photo credit: Kai Schreiber (Genista) via Visualhunt/CC BY-SA

We have seen how the citizens of Boulder, Colorado were reluctant to institute a soda tax without a firm idea of where the money would go. On the West coast, San Francisco voters were told the same thing — pass the tax first, stash the money in the city’s general fund, and then a soda tax committee would be formed to decide where to supply financial relief. Last fall, San Francisco, two other California cities, and Boulder passed their soda tax laws at around the same time.

For Vox.com, Julia Belluz summarized the hopes of a few different places:

In Britain, revenue from the drink taxes will fund childhood obesity interventions, such as sports programs in primary schools. In Berkeley, the money goes to children’s health programs in low-income areas that are battling particularly high rates of childhood obesity. Philadelphia’s tax will fund an array of community and education initiatives, including universal pre-kindergarten classes, building new community schools, and improving recreation centers, parks, and libraries throughout the city.

In February of this year, Philadelphia cardiologist Kenneth Margulies described the new program as a “game-changer” that enabled 2,000 children to enroll in pre-kindergarten classes. This was quick action, considering that the soda tax only went into effect on January 1.

When citizens can see immediate beneficial effects, it naturally influences their willingness to try other new things. The plan is to accommodate another thousand pre-K children this fall, and to eventually bring the number up to 6,500.

But that’s not all. Philadelphia’s soda tax is expected to bring in about $90 million per year, which will be used for school construction and expansion, parks and recreational facilities, and library improvements.

Seattle’s planned soda tax would be collected at the distributor level, with the increase then, of course, passed along to the customers. According to supporters, the tax might generate as much as $140 million of income each year, which could be used to “fight childhood obesity and fund other public health programs.” If it passes, 2018 is expected to bring in $23 million, but some city council members are unhappy because only 14% of that projected income is earmarked for public health programs.

Last year, pollsters verified that when citizens consider whether or not to support a soda tax, the final destination of the revenues is very much on their mind:

For example, support for a soda tax in New York was higher when pollsters said the money would go towards health care, children’s education, or parks and recreation.

Just to confuse things and make life more difficult, the industry will jump in there and lie to the people. When Oakland was deciding, voters received slick propaganda pieces in the mail claiming that the soda tax would be spread out over all groceries, and thus cost everybody more whether they drank fizzy sugar bombs or not.

When pondering the usefulness and consequences of such tariffs, people have philosophical and political responses, like the three economists who collaborated on a paper based on the assertion that the costs of implementing a sin tax will always outweigh the benefits. They suggest that “the limits of what defines a sin steadily are being expanded,” which is correct.

Public awareness campaigns to promote the soda tax concept are intentionally modeled after the effective anti-tobacco paradigm. The co-authors say:

Taxing sin might be reasonable if the revenue from these taxes was used to address the underlying negative consequences of consumption. In the real world, however, money generated by the tobacco settlement financed general spending and not smoking cessation programs or treating smoking-related diseases.

If nobody exhibited any of these behaviors, society as a whole would be much better off. Intellectually, most people would probably agree. But emotionally, not so much. The writers contend that sin taxes don’t affect, to any significant degree, what people actually do on a day-to-day-basis.

Consumption might decrease a bit, “but bad habits are hard to break.” That is the problem. Ideology is one thing; adjusting one’s own behavior is another.

The authors included a snarky question that exemplifies one objection to the soda tax concept:

What better way to raise revenue than to find something that your neighbor buys or an activity he engages in that you don’t like and tax it?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Soft Drinks Make For Bitter Election Year in Three Bay Area Cities,” NBCBayArea.com, 11/03/16
Source: “In a devastating blow to the beverage industry, four cities passed soda taxes,” Vox.com, 11/09/16
Source: “Commentary: Philly drink tax means a healthier, better educated city,” Philly.com, 02/21/17
Source: “Soda Tax Update: Santa Fe Rejects, Seattle Considers,” BevNet.com, 05/05/17
Source: “PepsiCo: The Soda Tax Is The Opportunity,” SeekingAlpha.com, 05/14/17
Source: “‘Sin Tax’ Costs Outweigh Benefits,” USNews.com, 02/25/13
Source: “Big Soda Spends Millions On ‘Unethical’ San Francisco Area Ads Fighting Drink Taxes,” HuffingtonPost.com, 08/24/16
Image by scanrail/123RF Stock Photo