6 ms·

Very well constructed argument. Please see here that the court is preventing subway from claiming tax breaks by classifying their product as staple food (bread)

Very well constructed argument. Please see here that the court is preventing subway from claiming tax breaks by classifying their product as staple food (bread). They are not preventing people from eating it.

plazmatic 6y ago
There's not even an argument here. It's just stream of consciousness, starting with "let me be the contrarian here..." Jesus. Hacker news is becoming useless with replies like this being top voted.
samatman 6y ago
Ah yes, I did read the article, and even comment that the Irish tax angle is of some interest. My riposte here is that the Irish definition of bread doesn't comport with many delicious baked goods I would be happy to call bread, and eat with cheese and some cold cuts. I'm glad you appreciated it. This isn't that unusual; Germans refuse to call many tasty beverages 'beer', and I'm sure this suits the Irish just fine.
- mantap 6y ago
  The point of the classification is to not unduly burden the poor by taxing staple foods, such as bread. It's not about being snobby, everybody can agree that on the outside of a subway sandwich there is bread. But subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. I wouldn't really call it a staple.
  - hyperpape 6y ago
    My opinion is that this is a bad policy. We could just tax it all equally (plenty of folks making good money eat at Subway) and ensure that the people have enough money to get by. But instead, governments around the world create these Rube Goldberg machines that require a court to define what bread is.
    - madsbuch 6y ago
      Just like software systems legal systems should probably get "refactored" once in a while. But just like managers don't really understand that need, politicians don't either.
      - Sharlin 6y ago
        Besides being unfair to both managers and politicians, that analogy doesn’t work. Refactoring by definition does not affect the visible behavior of a program. The judicial system is not a computer and cannot just happily start executing a newly refactored program. This is doubly so in common law jurisdictions that lean heavily on precedents and case law.
    - PietdeVries 6y ago
      In the Netherlands there are two levels of sales tax (BTW); the high one for "luxury" goods - 21%, and a low (9%) one for necessary stuff. A lot of goods are necessary, and there is no need for the country to profit from (after all, the sales tax goes to the government, not to the shop owner). You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax. And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...
    - mantap 6y ago
      Why not both? Ensure people have enough money to get by and don't levy sales tax on staple foods. People value cheaper food over conceptual simplicity of the tax system.
    - unionpivo 6y ago
      Sure in a perfect world your comment makes sense. But your comment essentially boils down to fix poverty. People have been trying to do that for a long time. Situation is improving in some places but we are still not even close to be there. So until we fix poverty, workarounds like this provide real help to real people.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    > subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. Exactly. If you add enough salt, sugar, and fat you can make anything taste good, regardless of whether it's actually "food". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food_Giants_Hooked_Us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food...
- FindMySocks 6y ago
  If only the entire planet would fall under your whimsical notions of categorization, maybe we'd have semblance of delicious order. At least in your mind.
- newbie789 6y ago
  I think this maybe boils down to how Ireland wants to tax sugar in general and has little to do with subjective definitions of what's a preferable foodstuff to them or those abroad.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Anytime you give something a legal definition, there’s no requirement that it has to resemble the common use of the word, and it often won’t. You can see the issue play out in the self-sustaining cycles of ever increasing complexity that you get with pretty much any regulatory framework. Take the FIA’s technical regulations of F1 as a non-political example. They’re long and get longer every year, primarily because they have to address issues like having a mass damper mounted inside the chassis defined a “moving aerodynamic part”, but a giant fan on the back of the car not defined as a “moving aerodynamic part”. I think it’s important for people to pay attention to, because when you hear somebody like a politician speaking, you might think that you know what all the words they’re saying mean, but there’s a good chance that you actually don’t.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    Right. This is just one of those cases where people get confused about different definitions in different contexts. This is about the "statutory definition of bread" for the purposes of being considered a "staple food" for tax purposes. The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be. "Your bread's so sweet the Irish government doesn't consider it bread!" Which is a fun point that I wholeheartedly endorse, but it doesn't make any difference to what we call "bread" in everyday life.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      > The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be I just went and looked at the Irish Tesco’s website, and plenty of the sliced bread they’re selling exceeds 2% sugar by weight. So if you were an Irish voter and you once heard a politician say “I’m going to make bread 0% VAT”, you could have easily been fooled into thinking that included the bread you get in your grocery shopping, when perhaps it doesn’t.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
        To be fair, sliced bread (the square stuff that's used to make sarnies and toasties) should not be called bread. Never mind the legal definition. It's a mess of supplements and emulsifiers and stabilisers and whatever. Yet, you can make perfectly good, delicious bread with only flour and water (not even salt, let alone sugar). Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?). In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money. Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.
- patrec 6y ago
  Excluding so many "tasty beverages" must be why German beer has such a terrible reputation.
  - Fezzik 6y ago
    Not to veer off on too much of a tangent, but I find Germany’s notoriety for beer odd. They’re main claim to fame is that that they have old beers... but you can find more diversity in locally brewed beers in 40 square city blocks in Portland (Ore.) than you can in all of Germany. I loved living in Germany, and love beer, but hype re Germany being exceptional for beer is just wrong and, I imagine, stems mostly from Oktoberfest and legend. Edit: typo
    - jamil7 6y ago
      Germany has great beers and many tiny “micro breweries” before that was even a trend, old and new. Germany just doesn’t do the style of craft beer that’s popular in the US. You won’t find “apricot IPAs” or whatever but there’s plenty of diversity in the different regions and styles of beer. I think the reputation is mostly justified especially in the south.
      - zaarn 6y ago
        I don't think it's entirely true in the south either, there is plenty of breweries around here, though granted a lot of them sell their own brew + brew from a distributor to balance their sheets. Many small towns have their own brewery, even if it just services the local tavern/restaurants with local + brand brew.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      There is about 25 local breweries in my area in germany. Half of them predate WW1, some are almost as old or even older than the United State of America. The town I was born in had a "micro brewery" run by monks since around the 1200s, the only reason they write "196x" is in part because it was destroyed during the thirty year war in the 17th century and then again during WW1 and WW2. The church never had much more than 20 people there and since atleast a hundred years the brewery is run by less than 3 people.
- scotty79 6y ago
  Are you very much against calling them cake or any other way than bread? I'd like to know if the thing that I'm going to buy will taste sweet or not and I treat, it having name 'bread', as a good indicator that it will taste rather salty than sweet.
- bww 6y ago
  A thing can be good and also not bread (or beer or whatever). You can even eat a thing with cheese and it may still not be bread – shocking, I know. Crackers are not bread. Coffee is good too and it’s not bread. It would be strange to insist that it should be considered bread on the basis that it’s a perfectly good food product. Or that it’s also made from a seed. Or any other arbitrary similarity it might have. The word “bread” still has a specific meaning.
- zaarn 6y ago
  In germany, being allowed to call yourself "beer" has quite a few legal requirements. Imported beer is largely exempted on account of EU law if they don't write "brewed according to german purity law" on the bottle, but locally brewed beer must adhere to strict rules on what is permitted to be put into it. Originally that essentially meant hops, wheat, water. Nowadays it may also include sugar, natural color enhancing, salt and simple preservatives. Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Surely you meant barley. I wasn't thinking of the many world-class microbrews in the USA, nor the proletarian pisswater either; most of them qualify as beer in Germany, that bitterness you're tasting comes from your palate, not the water. Rather of lambics, which, being not much of a beer drinker myself, I prefer. The sweet ones are alright, but a dry cherry lambic, now, that's what I call a beer.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      Barley isn't used much in my region, historically because while beer initially contained barley, the taxes were expensive so people lobbied for wheat. So nowadays, my region is largely wheat-based beers and barley isn't as common.
  - vinay427 6y ago
    > Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste. Honestly, this whole paragraph sounds incredibly ignorant from most any perspective. Most US generalizations have a certain amount of truth to them, but you seem to have picked the wrong ones. You have no idea what tasty beverages they were referring to, or that the US and many other countries have incredibly fast-growing craft brewery scenes, or that tap water isn't centrally managed across the US so poor water quality "in the US" is undefined.

plazmatic 6y ago

There's not even an argument here. It's just stream of consciousness, starting with "let me be the contrarian here..." Jesus. Hacker news is becoming useless with replies like this being top voted.

samatman 6y ago

Ah yes, I did read the article, and even comment that the Irish tax angle is of some interest. My riposte here is that the Irish definition of bread doesn't comport with many delicious baked goods I would be happy to call bread, and eat with cheese and some cold cuts. I'm glad you appreciated it. This isn't that unusual; Germans refuse to call many tasty beverages 'beer', and I'm sure this suits the Irish just fine.

mantap 6y ago
The point of the classification is to not unduly burden the poor by taxing staple foods, such as bread. It's not about being snobby, everybody can agree that on the outside of a subway sandwich there is bread. But subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. I wouldn't really call it a staple.
- hyperpape 6y ago
  My opinion is that this is a bad policy. We could just tax it all equally (plenty of folks making good money eat at Subway) and ensure that the people have enough money to get by. But instead, governments around the world create these Rube Goldberg machines that require a court to define what bread is.
  - madsbuch 6y ago
    Just like software systems legal systems should probably get "refactored" once in a while. But just like managers don't really understand that need, politicians don't either.
    - Sharlin 6y ago
      Besides being unfair to both managers and politicians, that analogy doesn’t work. Refactoring by definition does not affect the visible behavior of a program. The judicial system is not a computer and cannot just happily start executing a newly refactored program. This is doubly so in common law jurisdictions that lean heavily on precedents and case law.
  - PietdeVries 6y ago
    In the Netherlands there are two levels of sales tax (BTW); the high one for "luxury" goods - 21%, and a low (9%) one for necessary stuff. A lot of goods are necessary, and there is no need for the country to profit from (after all, the sales tax goes to the government, not to the shop owner). You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax. And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...
  - mantap 6y ago
    Why not both? Ensure people have enough money to get by and don't levy sales tax on staple foods. People value cheaper food over conceptual simplicity of the tax system.
  - unionpivo 6y ago
    Sure in a perfect world your comment makes sense. But your comment essentially boils down to fix poverty. People have been trying to do that for a long time. Situation is improving in some places but we are still not even close to be there. So until we fix poverty, workarounds like this provide real help to real people.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  > subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. Exactly. If you add enough salt, sugar, and fat you can make anything taste good, regardless of whether it's actually "food". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food_Giants_Hooked_Us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food...
FindMySocks 6y ago
If only the entire planet would fall under your whimsical notions of categorization, maybe we'd have semblance of delicious order. At least in your mind.
newbie789 6y ago
I think this maybe boils down to how Ireland wants to tax sugar in general and has little to do with subjective definitions of what's a preferable foodstuff to them or those abroad.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
Anytime you give something a legal definition, there’s no requirement that it has to resemble the common use of the word, and it often won’t. You can see the issue play out in the self-sustaining cycles of ever increasing complexity that you get with pretty much any regulatory framework. Take the FIA’s technical regulations of F1 as a non-political example. They’re long and get longer every year, primarily because they have to address issues like having a mass damper mounted inside the chassis defined a “moving aerodynamic part”, but a giant fan on the back of the car not defined as a “moving aerodynamic part”. I think it’s important for people to pay attention to, because when you hear somebody like a politician speaking, you might think that you know what all the words they’re saying mean, but there’s a good chance that you actually don’t.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Right. This is just one of those cases where people get confused about different definitions in different contexts. This is about the "statutory definition of bread" for the purposes of being considered a "staple food" for tax purposes. The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be. "Your bread's so sweet the Irish government doesn't consider it bread!" Which is a fun point that I wholeheartedly endorse, but it doesn't make any difference to what we call "bread" in everyday life.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    > The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be I just went and looked at the Irish Tesco’s website, and plenty of the sliced bread they’re selling exceeds 2% sugar by weight. So if you were an Irish voter and you once heard a politician say “I’m going to make bread 0% VAT”, you could have easily been fooled into thinking that included the bread you get in your grocery shopping, when perhaps it doesn’t.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
      To be fair, sliced bread (the square stuff that's used to make sarnies and toasties) should not be called bread. Never mind the legal definition. It's a mess of supplements and emulsifiers and stabilisers and whatever. Yet, you can make perfectly good, delicious bread with only flour and water (not even salt, let alone sugar). Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?). In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money. Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.
patrec 6y ago
Excluding so many "tasty beverages" must be why German beer has such a terrible reputation.
- Fezzik 6y ago
  Not to veer off on too much of a tangent, but I find Germany’s notoriety for beer odd. They’re main claim to fame is that that they have old beers... but you can find more diversity in locally brewed beers in 40 square city blocks in Portland (Ore.) than you can in all of Germany. I loved living in Germany, and love beer, but hype re Germany being exceptional for beer is just wrong and, I imagine, stems mostly from Oktoberfest and legend. Edit: typo
  - jamil7 6y ago
    Germany has great beers and many tiny “micro breweries” before that was even a trend, old and new. Germany just doesn’t do the style of craft beer that’s popular in the US. You won’t find “apricot IPAs” or whatever but there’s plenty of diversity in the different regions and styles of beer. I think the reputation is mostly justified especially in the south.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      I don't think it's entirely true in the south either, there is plenty of breweries around here, though granted a lot of them sell their own brew + brew from a distributor to balance their sheets. Many small towns have their own brewery, even if it just services the local tavern/restaurants with local + brand brew.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    There is about 25 local breweries in my area in germany. Half of them predate WW1, some are almost as old or even older than the United State of America. The town I was born in had a "micro brewery" run by monks since around the 1200s, the only reason they write "196x" is in part because it was destroyed during the thirty year war in the 17th century and then again during WW1 and WW2. The church never had much more than 20 people there and since atleast a hundred years the brewery is run by less than 3 people.
scotty79 6y ago
Are you very much against calling them cake or any other way than bread? I'd like to know if the thing that I'm going to buy will taste sweet or not and I treat, it having name 'bread', as a good indicator that it will taste rather salty than sweet.
bww 6y ago
A thing can be good and also not bread (or beer or whatever). You can even eat a thing with cheese and it may still not be bread – shocking, I know. Crackers are not bread. Coffee is good too and it’s not bread. It would be strange to insist that it should be considered bread on the basis that it’s a perfectly good food product. Or that it’s also made from a seed. Or any other arbitrary similarity it might have. The word “bread” still has a specific meaning.
zaarn 6y ago
In germany, being allowed to call yourself "beer" has quite a few legal requirements. Imported beer is largely exempted on account of EU law if they don't write "brewed according to german purity law" on the bottle, but locally brewed beer must adhere to strict rules on what is permitted to be put into it. Originally that essentially meant hops, wheat, water. Nowadays it may also include sugar, natural color enhancing, salt and simple preservatives. Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
- samatman 6y ago
  Surely you meant barley. I wasn't thinking of the many world-class microbrews in the USA, nor the proletarian pisswater either; most of them qualify as beer in Germany, that bitterness you're tasting comes from your palate, not the water. Rather of lambics, which, being not much of a beer drinker myself, I prefer. The sweet ones are alright, but a dry cherry lambic, now, that's what I call a beer.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    Barley isn't used much in my region, historically because while beer initially contained barley, the taxes were expensive so people lobbied for wheat. So nowadays, my region is largely wheat-based beers and barley isn't as common.
- vinay427 6y ago
  > Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste. Honestly, this whole paragraph sounds incredibly ignorant from most any perspective. Most US generalizations have a certain amount of truth to them, but you seem to have picked the wrong ones. You have no idea what tasty beverages they were referring to, or that the US and many other countries have incredibly fast-growing craft brewery scenes, or that tap water isn't centrally managed across the US so poor water quality "in the US" is undefined.