Obama cannot resist a nice new tax
Dear Barack Obama,
Despite the economic downturn, you are still rightly committed to creating a universal health insurance system in America. Seeing as it formed the backbone of your election platform, voters would not be particularly impressed if you walked away from such a bold plan. Even though your reforms could save over one trillion dollars in the long run, implementing your mandatory insurance system won’t come cheap. Thankfully, the answer to your financial prayers has come in the form of a new tax on soft drinks and alcohol.
The Democrats unveiled a draft of your health care bill last week. It requires all individuals to obtain health insurance and forces employers to offer health care to their workers, with exemptions for small businesses. You are now considering a 10 cents tax on the price of a can of soft drink to help pay for your reforms as well as higher alcohol taxes and a national sales tax of up to 1.5% or mor. The new federal tax on soft drinks would cover those sweetened with sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other high-calorie sweeteners, including iced tea and non-carbonated drinks like punch, but exempting diet drinks. Although this plan has not been finalised, it has the potential to raise about $600 billion over 10 years, which could prove invaluable over the rest of your term as President while you put your plans into action. Experience suggests that the new taxes will be passed onto consumers rather than being absorbed by the businesses themselves. Proponents of the tax cite research showing that consuming sugar-sweetened drinks can lead to obesity, diabetes and other ailments. They say the tax would lower consumption, reduce health problems and save medical costs. At least a dozen states already have some type of taxes on sugary beverages, but the main beverage lobby that represents Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo Inc., Kraft Foods Inc. and other companies said such a tax would unfairly hit lower-income Americans and wouldn’t deter consumption.
‘Sin taxes’ are a brilliant prospect, in my opinion. As evidenced in yesterday’s discussion of paying for obese people to get treatment courtesy of the taxpayer on the NHS, the issue of personal responsibility is something that many people feel is missing from society. The sad reality is that it often holds true that the unhealthiest food can be the cheapest – fast food and fizzy drinks being prime examples of this. That said, taxing an entire range of food is a stupid idea and will end unnecessarily stigmatising individual products that don’t actually damage anyone’s health. However, foods that are high in saturated fats or ‘trans-fats’ are known to cause serious health problems, while fizzy drinks that are high in particular ingredients such as sweeteners are also widely regarded as leading to all sorts of ailments, both dental and medical. Sin taxes are therefore an excellent way of ‘rebalancing the scales’ while still allowing each individual the choice over what they eat and drink, which is infinitely preferable to banning things. The point is that the cost of purchasing the most unhealthy food and drinks does not reflect the costs that they create for healthcare systems, and that is where sin taxes such as a ‘fat tax’ come in.
Because the need to raise money and lower debt during this economic downturn has become a huge priority not just for you but also for most developed nations, I wholeheartedly support your proposal to start taxing these items. Higher alcohol taxes and a new national sales tax are much more objectionable because they do not tackle health issues. Even a tax as small as 10 cents could raise significant sums of money at the same time as deterring people from engaging in behaviour that can incur significant costs to the US taxpayer over many years. If Gordon Brown in the UK decided to introduce similar measures to help fund the NHS, I would (grudgingly) support him because the principle is absolutely correct.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
An interesting piece. But as you rightly say the sugar substitutes can often lead to more health problems than if drinking sugary drinks in moderation. And if the tax was simply on the sugary drinks then more people might switch over to the low calorie, cheaper option and possibly create even worse health problems.
And as I so rudely/truthfully (*delete as appropriate) called the Americans ‘our burger eating cousins’ yesterday I think we should also mention their portion sizes! which lets face it are gigantic – KFCs family bucket over here would probably be labelled a light snack over there. This would be another good thing to tax. As well as taxing fatty foods and salty ready meals.
Ha, the Americans do like their portions. The BBC ran with a story today about how supermarket salads have more calories and fat than McDonalds, which is why you must tax the fat levels and not a particular group of products.
To be honest taxing sugary and fatty foods won’t instigate a sense of personal responsibility, that requires seeing current behaviour result in a more measurable loss of cash than the drip-drip-drip of taxation.
As for the NHS, rather than the murky tax system we have now, I’d much prefer to see it funded by everyone in the UK paying in weekly a sum that goes direct to the NHS. Bit like what National Insurance was supposed to be, until hijacked as another tax.
And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. If you’re on benefits, you’ll be deducted a certain amount. If you’re under 18, and without child (if you’ve given birth, congrats, you’re now an adult. Along with all the responsibilities that entails), your parents split your share. If there’s only one parent available to pay for their child, guess they get to pay the whole lot.
I would love to see the faces of everyone who then sees, in their weekly pay-packet, or in their reduced benefits, just how much the NHS costs (it’s around £70 a week for anyone working in the UK – (106 billion*/30 million**)/52=weekly cost). They might start taking an interest about what goes where then…
*approx. NHS budget
**approx. #people working in UK (recession has probably changed this downwards somewhat)
Oh, and claims that sugary and fatty foods are necessarily the cheapest is rot.
One American I used to chat to came from a very poor background, when younger, his mother regularly made tuna stew out of tuna, condensed mushroom soup and stock. Filling, nutritious and very, very cheap to feed a family with.
There are plenty of recipes like that.
Indeed, but that took cooking (all right, not much, but still…).
The cheap fatty foods in supermarkets are likely to be ready-meals and processed crap. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen a mum pushing a trolley loaded with this stuff, and seen her bill be equal to (or less than) mine!
Candid.
I think you are wrong about the fast food outlets in the USA. KFC in the USA comes without fries. Chicken, mashed potato, gravy, green beans, red beans, corn, salad, peas, sauces – served on a plate with knife and fork.
A meal deal in McDonalds USA is the same as the one here. Its the price in the USA that is different. If a big mac here was £3.50 it would be about $3.50 there. USA average wage is $40,400 which is a little higher than the UK’s £24,000 average, but does make an already cheap food seriously cheap.
Ob, of course it’s cheaper to make your own, but that isn’t the issue. It’s the availability / quality of the food (e.g. ready meals) that causes the problems. I know that the NHS is very, very expensive for each family, hence the appeal of a social insurance system to help drive people towards healthier lifestyles while getting the state out of healthcare provision – although that debate is for another day….
Bill, they also have Wendys in America which didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as McDonalds. The two countries are not directly equivalent, but the cultural attitude towards high-fat-high-salt-high-etc foods is a serious financial timebomb for both countries.
The other problem is that cooking food, fresh food, while potentially cheaper, does take more time. Sure Jamie Oliver or any of the other TV chefs can whip up something in 20 minutes but they are highly skilled professionals. Lots of people work 10 hour days in manual jobs with a few more hours commuting on top of that making them cash poor AND time poor. They go for the *quick* option – that it’s cheap is a bonus.
True, I wouldn’t want a tax to be delivered unless some serious efforts were made to support communities in less well-off areas who often struggle to find the time to cook and prepare food. Single parents will presumably have difficulties as well. Even so, sin taxes are still absolutely the right way forward, in my opinion.
Well I kind of agree, LFAT, but you could go further and ensure this is revenue neutral by using the money levied against ‘bad’ foods to subsidise or offset taxes around fresh fruit and vegetables and so on, grown domestically to benefit local producers into the bargain.
Obama is moving in on the tobacco industry too, signing the new law the other day. He is taking a lot of social ideas from Europe and trampling a few ‘freedoms’ too.
Sin is a matter for gods, not governments. Sin taxes are an excuse to tax the population heavily but prevent them complaining because they are “sinners”. It allows mass tax farming, generally of the pleasures enjoyed by the poorer and less politically represented classes. The peasantry (whether “rednecks” in the US, or “chavs” here) are presented as a despisable lot who are a burden on the Good Classes and deserve to be punished.
Poor people tend to seek out tasty, cheap, high calorie food sources for good reason- they are better value. Our society has developed a normalised class distinction from this, that the higher classes seek tasteless, expensive, low energy foods as a contrast. Since morality is always based upon the preferred behaviour of the dominant classes, this has led to lower class food behaviours to be treated as immoral, and higher class food and behaviours to be treated as moral. The distinction is as simple as a “workers’ caf” displaying a “large portions” sign to attract customers, compared to an expensive restaurant serving niggardly portions which offer inadequate nutrition (think, at the extreme, nouvelle cuisine- three peas floating artfully in a dribble of jus). This has been absorbed wholeheartedly into the progressive moral hegemony.
Progressives, as always, have subverted and used supposed science (“Junk Science”) to present a rationalist justification for their irrational classist attitudes. So, foods which are tasty, good nutritional sources (the hated “calorie” is a measure of energy content and thus nutritional value) and cheap are despised and, as our state moralism reaches fever pitch, the state is moving to try to create a nationalised menu for the populace. Meanwhile, having banned hatred towards traditional targets of hate (ehtnic groups, religious groups, homosexuals), new targets are declared and actively promoted by the state- fat people in this case. They are fat because they are sinners! Burn them with fire!
Food is fuel. The human body is homeostatic. It has 4 billion years of evolution behind it, which designed it to moderate itself. Different bodies have different homeostatic equilibria- some genomes work to maintain a thin body, others a fat one. Fat people can starve themselves thin, but there is no evidence that this is healthy for them, since permanent starvation is not a natural state. If the self-starvers stop starving, their weight returns to the equilibrium state that that body is “programmed” to maintain. The war on “obesity” is nothing more than a puritanical pogrom, wrapped in massaged statistics, invented science, pure quackery and moralist fervour. Please don’t support these people. They’re barmy.
trampling a few ‘freedoms’ too.
Smoking is a funny one; of course you have the freedom to kill youself (if able bodied – assisted suicide for the disabled is, understandably, a hobby horse of mine) but what you don’t have is the freedom to kill others, regardless of it’s it is slow like smoking death or quick like putting a 9mm round through your brain stem.
Passive smoking – that is the incidental inhalation of somebody else’s tobacco smoke – unquestionably increases the chance of dying from a tobacco-related cancer and is illegal in much the same way as wanting to shoot yourself through the head with an Armour Piercing round in such a way as to ensure that round flies into the crowd at a sports stadium would be illegal. The difference is that in the case of passive smoking, until you die (statistically of cancer or heart disease, you filthy tobacco fiend!), you’re around to face the consequences of acting in a way that may diminish the length of life of others.
While I argue for ‘consent’ exemptions to the UK law on passive smoking, 60 years of fairly compelling science suggests that it probably should be banned in general.
Food is fuel. The human body is homeostatic. It has 4 billion years of evolution behind it, which designed it to moderate itself.
Perhaps. Some evidence seems to show that some humans are adapted better to store fat, and more of it, than others. Why would that help them live? Well, in times of famine, bluntly, the thin die first. Science is actually needed to look at whether ‘fat genes’ or a virus leading to increased fat storage have increased in the population of ‘obese’ nations or if it is, as you and I suspect, just down to societal gluttony…
Passive smoking – that is the incidental inhalation of somebody else’s tobacco smoke – unquestionably increases the chance of dying from a tobacco-related cancer.
Ah, there I disagree. An objective look at the evidence available reveals no such link at all- despite dilligent searching through the statistics, no such causal relation is evident. And if one has looked very hard and found nothing, it is best to conclude that nothing is there. If the tiny quantities of smoke inhaled by “passive” smokers have any such health effect, it is so small as to be lost in the noise.
You may say that there are numerous studies showing an effect. The problem is, there are actually far fewer than you think- and the range of relative risks varies wildly from study to study. What we do see is that the larger the study, the smaller the effect. The largest study ever done (so large that it is unlikely to be repeated) and published in the BMJ in 2003, showed no effect at all. A similar large United Nations international study also showed zero effect, except for a statistically significant reduced cancer risk for the children of smokers(!). The WHO tried to weasel out of it by saying their own study was inadequate! When small studies show an effect and larger studies show smaller or zero effects, or obviously absurd results as in the UN case, it’s a safe bet that all that is being measured is noise or bias. The only rational conclusion to be drawn is that the effect being measured is beyond the resolution of the techniques available to us, much like trying to study a distant galaxy through a telescope which is too small.
“Passive smoking” is a political creation, by activist campaigners. It is unfortunate that there are large numbers of activists in the scientific community, churning out supporting data via a well oiled propaganda machine. But that doesn’t make what they are saying actually true.
I’d love to think you were right, Ian, but bearing in mind our human respiration is so shoddy that from an inhaled level of 16% o2, we exhale around 11%, using about 33% of that available in each breath, I find in inconceivable that we could logically inhale and trap 100% of the carcinogens from a ciggie. IN which case they have to go somewhere and in a confined space, it stands to reason that another person could breathe them in.
Now, if you want to tell me that smoking doesn’t increase the likelihood of certain cancers (note that I don’t say cause as that’s sloppy shorthand for the probability bagatelle of disease!) then I’d be interested to look at the science. Equally, to further validate my example, I’d point out that while an AP round through your brainstem is very likely to kill you, an AP round through you into someone in a crowd is very unlikely to kill them for the same reason hollowpoints are called ‘man stoppers’…
Shaun, I think it comes down to whether the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNTH) is valid. That is, if X of a substance causes Y harm, then 0.1 X causes 0.1 Y and so on. Again, knowing that the human body is both homeostatic and has evolved various defence mechanisms for survival, we should be skeptical of this. In terms of ordinary poisons, Chlorine is an horrific poison at high dosages, but entirely harmless at low ones, even though it can be clearly smelled. Invading bacteria or viruses need a certain “critical mass” of numbers to successfully overwhelm the immune system and infect the host. There is legionnaires’ disease bacteria in all our water, but only when sprayed into the nose in sufficient quantities do they become dangerous.
The natural environment is full of carcinogens. Every cooking fire, used by humans for millions of years, has pumped carcinogens into the atmosphere. Often the same people who are terrified of tobacco smoke- burning plant material- are happy to sit by log fire inhaling that homely scent of woodsmoke, which is full of carcinogenic chemicals. (Especially ludicrously, we are supposed to believe that marijuana, more burned plant material, is not carcinogenic at all!) The question is whether low levels of carcinogens have a proportionate effect to high levels. The best guess, since these effects are so difficult to measure is, “probably not”. Our DNA has self repair mechanisms designed to compensate for the constant chemical assault on our bodies that may lead to cancer- not just from smoke but from the very foods we eat and so on. The repair mechanisms are certianly overcome when a person subjects themselves to high levels of carcinogens, e.g. by smoking. But it’s also reasonable to presume that the body can handle low levels of smokes of any type just as it can handle low levels of chlorine.
Shaun, I think it comes down to whether the Linear No Threshold Hypothesis (LNTH) is valid. That is, if X of a substance causes Y harm, then 0.1 X causes 0.1 Y and so on. Again, knowing that the human body is both homeostatic and has evolved various defence mechanisms for survival, we should be skeptical of this.
But, as I outlined above, it’s about the word ’cause’ and our piss-poor understanding of probability and risk.
In terms of biology, there is only probability. A very very tiny minority of people are immune to the carcinogens in tobacco. 1% of people are expected to survive a bio-weapon attack due to natural immunity. I wish I were one of them! Tobacco doesn’t CAUSE cancer. Certain carcinogens in tobacco increase the LIKELIHOOD of developing cancer and of your immune system not taking it out. Vastly increase, if the evidence can be believed.
So the question is whether you have the right to a pass-time that *vastly increases* the risk of a bystander contracting a disease that they may have caught anyway. I’d argue that you don’t but equally if said bystander consenter to that risk, all would be well. Hence my support for ’smoking cars’ on trains and so on…
Julia M. Have you also done the “Brat” test of trolley contents?
If the person in front of you has whining, poorly behaved offspring, The trolley will generally be full of processed food, high salt and fat snacks and ready meals. If the person has well-behaved offspring, the trolley contents will be mostly fresh fruit, salads, wholemeal bread, raw fish and meat. As a rule of thumb, it works surprisingly well.
Shaun. I believe you have the right of the argument, but there’s one question. My paternal Father and Grandfather both worked in the coal-gas industry which by it’s very nature was carcenogenic. Both succumbed to Cancer in their 7th decade and so did many of their colleagues. The actual numbers involved have never been published, for if they were, the compensation bill would have been enormous. Roy Castle is the most notorious example used by the ASH Gestapo, a man who never smoked but died of a type of cancer whose major cause was held to be spending long periods in a smoked-filled room or smoking. I believe that reputable scientists have actually proved that there is an increased likelyhood of contracting cancer by working in smoke-filled bars, etc. Have you data to support your argument that smoking could be allowed in specific enclosed spaces?
Have you data to support your argument that smoking could be allowed in specific enclosed spaces?
No, but I have the logic that if you *consent* to be in an area with a risk from ciggie smoke, well then it’s on your head and the establishment is exempted from liability if you get an associated cancer. Simple. Staff could be incentivised through ‘danger money’….
It’s about choice and consent. For the same reason passive smoking is wrong (subjecting people to a risk without their consent), not having areas that smokers can willingly submit themselves to smokey environments ignores their consent.