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Mind you, I'm personally opposed to a sugar tax myself, since I like soda, so you have my bias explicitly stated here. I'm also interpreting his initial thing a
by esyir 6y ago
Mind you, I'm personally opposed to a sugar tax myself, since I like soda, so you have my bias explicitly stated here. I'm also interpreting his initial thing as a proxy for the more established "unhealthy food tax", most commonly proposed as a sugar tax.
>It’s not about “virtue points.” Its about understanding the true nature of the problem. Poorer people don’t disproportionately eat that food just because they’re too dumb to know better or somehow lack willpower. They often lack the time or access to higher quality affordable food. So by taxing it, you’ve just made a hard lifestyle even harder. To a large extent, the food consumption is the symptom of much larger problems. It’s not like just taxing soda will fix the US’s obesity epidemic. (The percentage of calories coming from soda doesn’t actually amount to enough - the numbers I’ve heard are around 6%). If anything, this type of taxation is the feel-good regulation that ignores the root problem. IMO that’s anything but pragmatic and tends to be be a shortfall of technocrats who sometimes fail to see the larger picture that spans multiple domains.
So, this isn't a feel-good regulation, nor is it something that ignores the root problems, The current research shows that a sugar tax would be effective. The fundamental issue here is that they ingest too many calories, and sugar is by far and large the easiest way to do so. You're saying that they'll have problems affording sugary foods. That's the entire point. This is not a tax that's targeted at revenue or fairness, this is a tax that's fundamentally constructed to modify behavior.
Furthermore, from a nutritional standpoint, 6% of calories from soda is huge. That's a half litre of soda per day or double what the Europeans drink on average. Remember that for obesity, it's the little things done many times that gets you. A consistent increase in calories per day, compounded over the years is exactly how you get an obesity problem. Of course it's one of many factors, but it is an important factor and low hanging fruit at that.
- bumby 6y ago>You're saying that they'll have problems affording sugary foods. That’s not quite what I’m saying and I think this is probably the core of our disagreement. I’m saying they are buying fatty or sugary (or otherwise unhealthy) food because they often lack access to suitable alternatives. “Suitable” being defined as relatively convenient and affordable. In that context, extra tax makes a bad situation worse. A somewhat clunky analogy would be levy a tax on any grocery store that doesn’t have a competitor within 50 miles. For the sake of the analogy, let’s say it’s in the vein of logistics/transportation externalities related to getting food to said store disproportionately contributing to climate change. What do you think that does to people in that community? It makes a shitty situation of lack of alternatives even worse. Before you hand waive this analogy as silly, I’ve lived in communities that were almost two hours from a grocery store and people had to pack coolers of ice in their pickup beds. There’s many other rural communities where a Family Dollar is the main grocery store. >The current research shows that a sugar tax would be effective. As an aside, a smaller point of disagreement is that I don’t think soda would fix the obesity problem. If it would, simply banning it would be a near panacea for our healthcare system. As you stated, obesity is much more complicated. As I understand it, the research shows sugar taxes are useful for reducing sugar consumption not necessarily at producing better health outcomes. It’s important to not conflate the two. That’s not to say it won’t lead to better health outcomes, just that the longitudinal data has isn’t there yet.