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In the UK there is a tax on sugary drinks so people pay more which is a good thing. Just shows if this tax is adopted how much of a nuisance certain companies a

In the UK there is a tax on sugary drinks so people pay more which is a good thing. Just shows if this tax is adopted how much of a nuisance certain companies are for the health and environment

avar 7y ago
Those sorts of sin taxes are the poster child for dumbly implemented tax policy. Tax the waste and pollution, or obesity and other health impacts that cause societal externalities. There's nothing wrong with drinking sugary water in moderation.
- kibibu 7y ago
  Not in countries with partially or fully-socialized healthcare. If drinking litres of cola causes diseases that the public purse has to support, then pay more for the cola.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Just deny care to those who drink soda or do other unhealthy things.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
      Difficult to implement, how do you know if a given person is obese due to soda or to, e.g., genetics? And even if it could be implemented, it's still not the point of universal healthcare. In most European countries we'd rather take care of everyone, even those who are guilty of their own health problems. For example, and even from an egoistic point of view and leaving ethics aside, I'd rather have drug addicts treated and sheltered with my tax money than having to encounter dozens of them, homeless and stinking from bad hygiene, every time I walk the street, as I have seen in many US cities.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - pixl97 7y ago
        Because 99.999% of people are going to be because of soda.
    - geertj 7y ago
      That would be inconsistent with generally accepted social values in western countries.
    - journalctl 7y ago
      I can’t tell if you’re kidding, but this is a slippery slope that doesn’t end well, especially for addictive behavior. “Oh, you’re addicted to opioids? Sorry, no treatment for you. Maybe you should’ve been more responsible.” It’s not the job of a doctor to pass moral judgement on you. They can recommend healthier habits, but doctors deciding whom to treat and whom not to treat based on some arbitrary moral judgement is really scary territory. It’s punitive and more importantly, it doesn’t work. Punishing people for their self-induced health problems doesn’t make them better, and it opens the door to some really scary discrimination.
      - avar 7y ago
        If you don't do that you're on the other end of that slippery slope. Should a chain smoker and someone with no elective risk factors have equal eligibility for a lung transplant? They're otherwise comparable patients. One's going to die, and there's only one lung to go around. We seem to survive as a society by using systems like that for insurance that isn't health insurance. If your house burns down it matters if it was because of foreseeable and reckless behavior on your part.
        journalctl 7y ago
        Except it’s easy to prove negligence with a house fire, less so for medical problems. But those aren’t equivalent things. A fire is a one-off event, and if you don’t catch it right away, it runs its course and then it’s over. But how do you adequately paint a smoker as negligent? They’re certainly doing it to themselves, but they also have an addiction, propped up by companies and a society and probably a social group that supports them. It’s obvious whether or not you’ve had a house fire, and it’s sometimes possible to divine who was at fault. But healthcare isn’t binary like that. Organ transplants are a special case too, and the ethics there are tricky because of limited resources. It also depends he wilt on compatibility. It doesn’t really matter if a smoker gets new lungs and a non-smoker doesn’t if the smoker is compatible with available lungs and the non-smoker isn’t.
        avar 7y ago
    - extropy 7y ago
      Right and then pay with increased crime and homlessnes.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    This is the biggest corporate and right wing driver for opposing socialized medicine in the US. It isn't the free healthcare that is problem,because a rational corp would love to offload health care costs onto the worker, it is that it will completely upend the relationship between corporations and the government.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    > "Not in countries with partially or fully-socialized healthcare." Even in countries without, the public still end up paying the price in the end. Even if they don't see it manifest in their taxes, the social cost of cola manifests in other ways such as living in an environment where obesity is commonplace (aesthetic impact), having obese friends and family (particularly medical expenses in the family.) When obesity is commonplace, fit labor is in short supply which drives up the cost of everything. Public transit holds fewer people when massively obese cola drinkers are filling up more than one seat. Fewer people walk or cycle around town, opting instead to drive which results in worse traffic and worse air quality. The perceived importance of outdoor facilities like parks, hiking trails, etc all take a hit. All in all, obesity is bad for the economy, bad for the environment, and bad for the aesthetic qualities of society. When the majority are physically fit, everybody benefits (even those who aren't fit.) When the majority are unfit, everybody is harmed (even those who are fit.)
- Pxtl 7y ago
  If you drink sugary drinks in moderation, your total outlay to the sin tax will be negligible.
  - avar 7y ago
    Sure, but the reverse is also true. If you drink sugary drinks in levels where they're the primary cause of some massive health problem your healthcare costs will far exceed what can be recouped from sugar taxes. I'm not saying it's a dumb tax because a triathlete on a model diet who likes to have a can of coke once a month is going to break the bank. It's a dumb tax because as an instrument of public policy it doesn't begin to do enough to tax preventable diet-caused illnesses. If that's the desired effect we should just operate it like auto-insurance. A health exam will decide your tax rate, have privacy concerns? Don't do the exam and be in the highest bracket. The same is true for your auto insurance and your accident rate. It's doubly dumb because it's also enacted due to concerns over pollution, that's a worthwhile thing to fix, but taxing sugar doesn't help. The pollution needs to be taxed, then whoever's selling polluting drink containers (whether they have sugar in them or not) has an incentive to not pollute. It's also a regressive tax. Someone who's rich pays more towards public health care, and that's generally considered a good idea, but then we're going to say that their efforts to intentionally destroy their health (forcing more expenditures) should be unrelated to income?
    - pixl97 7y ago
      Taxes on said sugars would reduce consumption which would reduce health expenditures. Also we should also attack from the other side that makes corn insanely cheap which gets turned into HFCS.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- smileysteve 7y ago
  ... where a 20oz sugary drink is 80+% of the daily recommended sugar intake. But the sugar is also hiding the phosphoric acid, which also has negative health impacts, along with amplifying liver damage.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    No it doesn't. That just some health bloggers questionable hypothesis. Just don't drink a 2L of soda a day mmmm kay? that much sugar is more worrisome than phosphoric acid
brianwawok 7y ago
Chicago had a soda tax and it didn’t go over so well. Perhaps the cultural differences of sin tax?
MrStonedOne 7y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to advocate for a sin tax. What you are basically arguing is that government should either penalize poor people for making health choices they don't like, or limit the ability of poor people to make those choices by making it too expensive for them. This does not into a functional society.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Why shouldn't government use a tax to influence health? Tax the things you don't want - tobacco, unhealthy food, carbon emissions and tax breaks on the things you do. It worked very well cutting smoking in the UK, in tandem with advertising and shop display restrictions.
  - MrStonedOne 7y ago
    The ends do not the justify the means, and the means is the government saying that poor people get one set of freedoms, and rich people get another.
    - carapace 7y ago
      You're gonna love this: recently, in San Francisco, a measure has been passed to make parking meters "demand-responsive". https://www.govtech.com/fs/automation/San-Francisco-Rolls-Out-Dynamic-Parking-Rate-Model.html https://www.govtech.com/fs/automation/San-Francisco-Rolls-Ou... > As of December, San Francisco has transitioned its SFpark pilot into a citywide program to set rates on all 28,000 parking spaces on public streets and 14 city-operated garages. The plan prices parking based on demand — not unlike the approach used by airlines to set fares or ride-hailing apps to set the price of a trip. > “Demand-responsive pricing,” as the concept is known, means “prices could fluctuate block by block, time-band by time-band, and then weekday versus weekend,” said Hank Wilson, parking policy manager for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). > The new approach to setting parking rates in San Francisco based on demand is not intended as an effort to raise parking revenue, officials stress. In fact, the new system will likely be revenue neutral because rates on many streets and in garages will likely drop.

In the UK there is a tax on sugary drinks so people pay more which is a good thing. Just shows if this tax is adopted how much of a nuisance certain companies are for the health and environment

avar 7y ago

Those sorts of sin taxes are the poster child for dumbly implemented tax policy. Tax the waste and pollution, or obesity and other health impacts that cause societal externalities. There's nothing wrong with drinking sugary water in moderation.

kibibu 7y ago
Not in countries with partially or fully-socialized healthcare. If drinking litres of cola causes diseases that the public purse has to support, then pay more for the cola.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Just deny care to those who drink soda or do other unhealthy things.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    Difficult to implement, how do you know if a given person is obese due to soda or to, e.g., genetics? And even if it could be implemented, it's still not the point of universal healthcare. In most European countries we'd rather take care of everyone, even those who are guilty of their own health problems. For example, and even from an egoistic point of view and leaving ethics aside, I'd rather have drug addicts treated and sheltered with my tax money than having to encounter dozens of them, homeless and stinking from bad hygiene, every time I walk the street, as I have seen in many US cities.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pixl97 7y ago
      Because 99.999% of people are going to be because of soda.
  - geertj 7y ago
    That would be inconsistent with generally accepted social values in western countries.
  - journalctl 7y ago
    I can’t tell if you’re kidding, but this is a slippery slope that doesn’t end well, especially for addictive behavior. “Oh, you’re addicted to opioids? Sorry, no treatment for you. Maybe you should’ve been more responsible.” It’s not the job of a doctor to pass moral judgement on you. They can recommend healthier habits, but doctors deciding whom to treat and whom not to treat based on some arbitrary moral judgement is really scary territory. It’s punitive and more importantly, it doesn’t work. Punishing people for their self-induced health problems doesn’t make them better, and it opens the door to some really scary discrimination.
    - avar 7y ago
      If you don't do that you're on the other end of that slippery slope. Should a chain smoker and someone with no elective risk factors have equal eligibility for a lung transplant? They're otherwise comparable patients. One's going to die, and there's only one lung to go around. We seem to survive as a society by using systems like that for insurance that isn't health insurance. If your house burns down it matters if it was because of foreseeable and reckless behavior on your part.
      - journalctl 7y ago
        Except it’s easy to prove negligence with a house fire, less so for medical problems. But those aren’t equivalent things. A fire is a one-off event, and if you don’t catch it right away, it runs its course and then it’s over. But how do you adequately paint a smoker as negligent? They’re certainly doing it to themselves, but they also have an addiction, propped up by companies and a society and probably a social group that supports them. It’s obvious whether or not you’ve had a house fire, and it’s sometimes possible to divine who was at fault. But healthcare isn’t binary like that. Organ transplants are a special case too, and the ethics there are tricky because of limited resources. It also depends he wilt on compatibility. It doesn’t really matter if a smoker gets new lungs and a non-smoker doesn’t if the smoker is compatible with available lungs and the non-smoker isn’t.
        avar 7y ago
  - extropy 7y ago
    Right and then pay with increased crime and homlessnes.
- sitkack 7y ago
  This is the biggest corporate and right wing driver for opposing socialized medicine in the US. It isn't the free healthcare that is problem,because a rational corp would love to offload health care costs onto the worker, it is that it will completely upend the relationship between corporations and the government.
- catalogia 7y ago
  > "Not in countries with partially or fully-socialized healthcare." Even in countries without, the public still end up paying the price in the end. Even if they don't see it manifest in their taxes, the social cost of cola manifests in other ways such as living in an environment where obesity is commonplace (aesthetic impact), having obese friends and family (particularly medical expenses in the family.) When obesity is commonplace, fit labor is in short supply which drives up the cost of everything. Public transit holds fewer people when massively obese cola drinkers are filling up more than one seat. Fewer people walk or cycle around town, opting instead to drive which results in worse traffic and worse air quality. The perceived importance of outdoor facilities like parks, hiking trails, etc all take a hit. All in all, obesity is bad for the economy, bad for the environment, and bad for the aesthetic qualities of society. When the majority are physically fit, everybody benefits (even those who aren't fit.) When the majority are unfit, everybody is harmed (even those who are fit.)
Pxtl 7y ago
If you drink sugary drinks in moderation, your total outlay to the sin tax will be negligible.
- avar 7y ago
  Sure, but the reverse is also true. If you drink sugary drinks in levels where they're the primary cause of some massive health problem your healthcare costs will far exceed what can be recouped from sugar taxes. I'm not saying it's a dumb tax because a triathlete on a model diet who likes to have a can of coke once a month is going to break the bank. It's a dumb tax because as an instrument of public policy it doesn't begin to do enough to tax preventable diet-caused illnesses. If that's the desired effect we should just operate it like auto-insurance. A health exam will decide your tax rate, have privacy concerns? Don't do the exam and be in the highest bracket. The same is true for your auto insurance and your accident rate. It's doubly dumb because it's also enacted due to concerns over pollution, that's a worthwhile thing to fix, but taxing sugar doesn't help. The pollution needs to be taxed, then whoever's selling polluting drink containers (whether they have sugar in them or not) has an incentive to not pollute. It's also a regressive tax. Someone who's rich pays more towards public health care, and that's generally considered a good idea, but then we're going to say that their efforts to intentionally destroy their health (forcing more expenditures) should be unrelated to income?
  - pixl97 7y ago
    Taxes on said sugars would reduce consumption which would reduce health expenditures. Also we should also attack from the other side that makes corn insanely cheap which gets turned into HFCS.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
smileysteve 7y ago
... where a 20oz sugary drink is 80+% of the daily recommended sugar intake. But the sugar is also hiding the phosphoric acid, which also has negative health impacts, along with amplifying liver damage.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  No it doesn't. That just some health bloggers questionable hypothesis. Just don't drink a 2L of soda a day mmmm kay? that much sugar is more worrisome than phosphoric acid

brianwawok 7y ago

Chicago had a soda tax and it didn’t go over so well. Perhaps the cultural differences of sin tax?

MrStonedOne 7y ago

I wouldn't be so quick to advocate for a sin tax. What you are basically arguing is that government should either penalize poor people for making health choices they don't like, or limit the ability of poor people to make those choices by making it too expensive for them. This does not into a functional society.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Why shouldn't government use a tax to influence health? Tax the things you don't want - tobacco, unhealthy food, carbon emissions and tax breaks on the things you do. It worked very well cutting smoking in the UK, in tandem with advertising and shop display restrictions.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  The ends do not the justify the means, and the means is the government saying that poor people get one set of freedoms, and rich people get another.
  - carapace 7y ago
    You're gonna love this: recently, in San Francisco, a measure has been passed to make parking meters "demand-responsive". https://www.govtech.com/fs/automation/San-Francisco-Rolls-Out-Dynamic-Parking-Rate-Model.html https://www.govtech.com/fs/automation/San-Francisco-Rolls-Ou... > As of December, San Francisco has transitioned its SFpark pilot into a citywide program to set rates on all 28,000 parking spaces on public streets and 14 city-operated garages. The plan prices parking based on demand — not unlike the approach used by airlines to set fares or ride-hailing apps to set the price of a trip. > “Demand-responsive pricing,” as the concept is known, means “prices could fluctuate block by block, time-band by time-band, and then weekday versus weekend,” said Hank Wilson, parking policy manager for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). > The new approach to setting parking rates in San Francisco based on demand is not intended as an effort to raise parking revenue, officials stress. In fact, the new system will likely be revenue neutral because rates on many streets and in garages will likely drop.