Sugar tax surprise in U.K. budget, but growth forecasts cut
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I suspect it's a class issue: politicians see soda as something that poor, obese people drink, but a white chocolate mocha is not.
Bloomberg targeted sugary drinks, there was no exception for Starbucks. What soda banning events to you believe constitute this pattern?
[1] The organisation Public Health.
If you earn 50K a year then 10 quid for a bottle of wine that cost 2 quid to produce isn't really a problem.
If you earn 10K a year and have nothing left after rent, it is.
Another point to consider is that 'encouraging people to eat healthily' is an attempt to impose a culture - that's half of what a 'class' is (the other half being income/wealth). It's essentially saying - live like us, we're better, society will be better if you're like us.
The elite don't need to care about their impact on the NHS - the middle classes are probably paying enough in taxes - the poor aren't.
Common rhetoric at the moment in the UK is to decry any notion of taxes as redistribution - the poor are openly considered 'scroungers' by the government - it's pretty much business as usual these days for the state to minimize the impact of the poor on the rest of society.
I see it as an attempt to save money, or rather an attempt to account for all the externalities - that is, at least if there is scientific consensus that the measure you're introducing statistically helps people live longer/healthier and reduces healthcare costs (I've no idea if that's the case here).
This is a crazy way of looking at it. You might as well have said 100 years ago that education beyond 14 was an imposition on the poor. In a lot of cities in the UK there is an 18 year gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas. Almost 20% of children and 30% of adults in the UK are clinically obese. At some point you have to stop with ideological back and forth and start actually doing something practical.
Too often terms get overloaded - taxation is definitionally an imposition; consumption taxes impose on the poor more than on the rich. Compulsory education is also an imposition.
Whether it's worth doing it anyway is of seperate concern. I don't know a better way.
My personal view is that socialized healthcare is excellent - but the limits it eventually imposes on personal freedom (taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugar, etc etc) are something we should be very careful with.
The main issue as I see it is that I feel that the role of the private sector is to act in a 'one dollar = one vote' manner, whilst the public sector should act in a 'one person = one vote' manner. Consumption taxes break this because they work on the former basis. I think that if we want to discourage bad habits, we should apply the same 'discouragement' to both the wealthy and the poor.
(Interestingly enough, if we take the standpoint that sugary drinks are a net negative to health, then it makes sense from an economic point of view to expend more effort on wealthy consumers of sugary drinks, because they presumably are able to convert health into taxes at a higher rate...)
To drink one of those coffees you have to actually go to Costa Coffee or Starbucks. It's too expensive to drink daily for the vast majority of the population. And most people who go to coffee shops don't drink those anyway. All of those would suggest that the public health effects of the two are vastly different. The tax should apply to both, but from a public health perspective I doubt it matters.
The tax on soda seems to be about correcting behavior and raising money, while the tax on sugary coffee drink seems to be mostly about raising money. And extra 0.10 on a mocha whatever isn't going to stop people from buying them.
> And most people who go to coffee shops don't drink that anyway.
This isn't true. I worked at a Starbucks while in college and frappuccinos are very very popular. The majority of people who go to Starbucks order drinks with sugar, especially after the morning rush where a many people will just get black coffee... some of those people also add sugar, too. Caramel Frappuccino's and Caramel Macchiato are 2 of the most popular items on the menu, and Frappuccino's are much more popular in the summer.
Are you in the UK? There is more of a social stigma on that than in the US.
As for whether it's class focused... well, the other BBC article on the matter says that only milk and pure fruit juices are exempt, along with the smallest companies/producers:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35824071
So it probably will hit the likes of Starbucks and Costa as much as the likes of Coca Cola and Pepsi. Whether it makes a difference there... probably not. It's like the bag charge, fairly useless to a lot of people.
As for the other taxes... some seem decent enough, though the tax cuts aimed at higher earners is as ridiculous as ever.
not to mention, and to my utter horror, all schools in England will be turned into academies, and in doing so pass out of public hands into private ownership. A naked landgrab. Fucking disgusting.
Is anything wrong with it? I don't get it, they still get government funding & don't need to get sponsors even though they can? The issue is that the assets are transferred to these trusts and they don't follow the local education authority..
The hoped-for good outcome is that they'll be run by competent technocrats who will do a good job while being insulated from politics. The worried-about bad outcome is that entities with no democratic oversight can end up captured by their administrators, and drift increasingly away from the needs/wants of the local population.
In practice, the national government retains some kind of oversight of UK academies, in part because it controls most of their budget. So they can't completely go off into doing whatever they want. But local government no longer does. So another way of looking at it is that the move represents a centralization of educational oversight, removing oversight power from local government authorities and investing it in the national Department for Education instead. In my personal opinion that's the wrong direction; I'd rather have schools be more locally run.
if it were some product falling through that cracks, who the hell would care, but that's some kids future.
I spoke to a couple of brit teachers and they say it lets them use their own teaching ideas & get more teachers (apparently no one wants to be a teacher).
So i'm guessing it can improve schools dramatically as well as make them worse. It can improve them, though.
Taxes to be cut: top-rate capital gains, corporation tax, income tax for some brackets
Taxes to be raised: tobacco duty, soda duty, tax on insurance
[1] - http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/21/david-cam...
The cost of the taxed drinks, indeed, sharply rose.
The cost of the other untaxed drinks that were caloric substitutes, like juice or milk, did not go up. This suggests that people were not just substituting soft drinks for other high calorie drinks.
Early results suggest that the tax may achieve its goal of weight loss, but it is too early to tell.
Start by getting rid of the subsidies and that will naturally raise the price. Effectively it is the same thing but it is fairer and less administrative hassle for the government.
First they came for the fizzy drinks, and I did nothing because.... well, I waddled up to say something but by the time I got there they'd gone.
The thing about British teeth? It's sort of true. Tooth extraction is a leading cause of child hospitalisation. (Most common cause for children between 5 and 9).
This tooth decay is mostly preventable.
https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/news/sharp-increase-in-children-adm...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33498324
> A report by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) published earlier this year showed tooth decay was the most common reason five to nine-year-olds were admitted to hospital.
> Approximately 46,500 children and young people under 19 were admitted to hospital with tooth decay in 2013-14, with 25,812 in the five to nine age group, a 14% increase since 2010-11.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/27/england-hospi...
If the tax is high enough it might be worth it for them to do that.
People know that "smoking is bad and increases risk of death", but most people have no idea just how bad or why.
The public health message of "smoking is harmful" hasn't changed much over the past twenty years. The amounts of tax and the prohibitions on smoking in public buildings have.
Case in point is of Eric Garner[1] who got killed by NYC cops because they thought he was selling loose cigarette. This is an extreme case that got media attention but I am pretty sure NY cops harass people all the time for such laws.
Everyone on HN probably agrees that marijuana ban has done more harm than good. If total ban is 1 then increasing taxes is probably 0.5 where 0 is totally unregulated. It is a step in wrong direction.
And in the form of principle I would argue that it is not government's job to manipulate our opinions and values of life.
Almost everyone on HN agrees that Apple should not cave in under FBI pressure. What if government increases tax on iPhones because they are encrypted ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner#Death
In countries like India it is even worse. Increased taxes on mass manufactured cigars means more and more people take to hand made cigars which are far worse than nicotine as they give out lot more of CO.