Candy Corn is universally despised, and yet...does anything so singularly symbolize the attraction and revulsion we feel towards the unholy conversion of corn into high fructose corn syrup into food we cannot resist?
They want to tax your soda, dear reader. (Incidentally, depending on where in the United States you are reading this, you are upset with me for calling your favorite beverage “soda”, since you call it either “pop” if you live in the Northwest, or simply “Coke” [KO] if you live in the Southeast.) This is a problem for you because you drink so damn much of it, but it’s great for our PopEconomy! because of the money we can raise.
Based upon the expert recommendations of the Arkansas Surgeon General and NY City Health Commissioner, in part, a proposal was released through the New England Journal of Medicine to levy a 1-cent per ounce national tax on sodas and other sweetened beverages. Their studies demonstrated the benefits of such a tax would include revenue (obviously) while also discouraging people from consuming extra calories; they cited studies which showed that women who drank sugar-sweetened beverages were at greater risk of obesity and diabetes.
Although they’d hoped to slip this tax into the larger healthcare reform Bills floating around, that opportunity slipped through their grasp when the White House rejected a soda tax initiative mid-September. (33 states individually levy fairly small sales taxes on soft drinks, roughly on the order of 5-cents per $1. The national proposal above goes beyond that in the range of around 12-cents per $1).
So what are we talking in real numbers, and why am I not giving up so easily? The authors claim such a national sales tax would reap $15 Billion in its first year, not to mention a yearly 2-pound weight loss for soda drinkers. They envision plowing the money back into child nutrition and obesity prevention programs, which I find absolutely precious.
The historical footnote to all of this is what’s interesting: unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard the reverse-engineering for what seeded our national obesity epidemic in the first place: protectionist trade policies begat the switch from cane and beet sugars to corn (embargos and tariffs + subsidies) begat the rise of high fructose corn syrup begat this. Although it’s a remarkable story, there may be something apocryphal to it, as this article from Slate debunks the notion that HFCS (as we in the sugar trade call it) is any less natural or unhealthy than glucose or sucrose, or for that matter much less “high” than good ol’ fructose. The one fallacy they gloss over as it pertains to our purposes is hypothesizing what would happen if there were abundant sugar available everywhere, when in fact we DO still impose a Cuban embargo and DO still subsidize US corn farmers: whether the author believes its cost is trivial to the price of the can of soda, HFCS is still cheaper on a relative basis.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:00 AM
I’ve been reading along for a while now. I just wanted to drop you a comment to say keep up the good work.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:00 AM
I just stopped by your blog and thought I would say hello. I like your site design. Looking forward to reading more down the road.
October 7th, 2009 at 2:02 AM
A curious thing about sin taxes is how raising them lowers consumption: I suppose there’s some art and science to finding right where the point of diminishing returns is. This is true for the national soda tax you’re writing about here, as well as the cigarette taxes mentioned in the Truth Campaign post below, and also for gas taxes. Didn’t we actually impose (or at least debate) a summer-long gas tax recess while prices were through the roof? That might be an interesting post topic, ie what the US is reaping in gas taxes? Keep up the good work!
October 7th, 2009 at 2:07 AM
Thanks for the topic idea ‘ChoosersNotBeggars’. I do remember there was fierce debate surrounding the gas tax holiday…that should prove relatively easy to research; it will just be a matter of cobbling together some useful figures for either 2009 or 2010, thx!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:50 AM
Hi Harold,
Sin taexes are such tricky, or in this case, sticky situation. I usally side with the individual’s power of choice. When government begins to dicate what is good and bad for you, we venture into dangerous territory.
As for me, I’m a soda guy. They don’t start saying Pop until Ohio, methinks
May 19th, 2010 at 9:48 AM
A curious thing about sin taxes is how raising them lowers consumption: I suppose there’s some art and science to finding right where the point of diminishing returns is. This is true for the national soda tax you’re writing about here, as well as the cigarette taxes mentioned in the Truth Campaign post below, and also for gas taxes. Didn’t we actually impose (or at least debate) a summer-long gas tax recess while prices were through the roof? That might be an interesting post topic, ie what the US is reaping in gas taxes? Keep up the good work!