8 years ago
17
Philadelphia passes a soda tax
Philadelphia has become the second city in the United States to approve a soda tax. In a final vote of 13-4, the Philadelphia City Council on Thursday passed a 1.5-cents-per-ounce tax on sugar-added and artificially sweetened soft drinks. That would a...
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You should have heard how desperate the opposition's radio ads were getting towards the end of the fight. Even from the get-go, they never used the word 'soda' once, it was always 'grocery' or 'everyday necessity', I guess being misleading was worth using words that polled better. Yes, I know this is a universal tactic, but it really stood out to me in this fight because of how obvious it was.
By using grocery the hope is that you'll realize that if they come for your coke today due to it's sugary substance content then tomorrow it's not far fetched they will come for your twinkies, white bread and cereals. It's a slippery slope, IMO.
That's more than their beer taxes, which is .08¢ for 160 ounces.
I don't understand this in the slightest. It's a another regressive food tax in a state with no food exception for state tax. The budgetary allocations for the funds are always drivel and will ultimately be pulled into the general fund like everything else. It taxes both sugar based drink and artificial sweeteners so there is no obesity control angle. I'm still trying to find what is supposed to qualify as a 'healthy' drink, besides say bottled water.
I consider any kind of 100% fruit juice as a healthy drink.
Not to overgeneralize but even with the fairly rare consumptive models that actually offer 100% natural juice without adding additional sweeteners, most fruit juices have a comparable amount of sugar to your average soda by volume.
Sure, but it's naturally occurring sugar. It's not a whole lot better, just slightly. The real (health) ideal here, is to drink mostly water and eat your fruits fresh.
I'm confused on how this is actually going to help solve the problem. A similar tax has been suggested where I live and I don't get it. I'm not a nutritionist but it seems that sodas can't possibly be the only factor in control obesity. What's next? A tax on my local fish and chips?
In my opinion, this alone will not solve all of the problem, but is a small step in the right direction. Let me explain that :
Part of the problem (which is more complex than most people care to admit) is that people consume too much sugar, refined in particular (notice that I said "too much", we do need sugar (carbohydrates to be precise) to live, it's the basis of the energy our muscles and other cells use). And too much transformed food with all kinds of added crap used to either sweeten the taste, change its color, make it last longer (and by "last" I mean look nice, not "be edible", but that's a whole other debate) or reduce the general cost of the complete product. And too little fresh fruits and vegetables and home made dishes of all kinds (made with fresh, quality ingredients and nothing else).
A part of the problem is that artificially sweetened beverages cost less than water, so poorer people and those that don't know better will pick the unhealthy choice without thinking. Taxing the unhealthy choice makes it more expensive, so the healthy one is more attractive, at least economically speaking.
A more complete ideal plan (again, in my opinion), would be to tax unhealthy additives directly, on a wider scale (federally, even globally), and use that money to subsidize small farmers who sell locally, so you have 2 way leverage plan : make the unhealthy food more expensive and the fresh, locally produced food cheaper with the same action, and as an added bonus, you encourage smaller scale, closer-to-its-consumers farming, which is very tough economically compared to bigger industries that don't care much about the quality of the food they produce (or much else besides their bottom line, really) : 3 birds, one stone!
Edit : Oh! and by the way, artificial sweeteners that are used in diet beverages is actually worse than sugar : it makes the drink sweet without the carbohydrate that it usually means, so your brain prepares to receive an energy boost because of the taste, but it never comes, so it digests your muscle tissue instead, and if you do that often enough, your body gets used to it (not receiving the energy that it needs, despite the taste), so it stocks any form of energy it can find elsewhere, in the form of fat. So diet beverages actually make you fatter than the regular (still crap for your health) sweet beverages. And that is without considering a good chunk of these artificial sweeteners are also carcinogenic (they give you cancer).
I'd love to see some credible sources for any of this. It's may be generally accepted by noueveau hippy types, but there is little and no science behind almost all of it. For starters all the cancer studies that seem to be constantly recycled like a social virus, is complete bunk. The only ones I'm aware of tested with dosages so far out of proportion to the size of the test subject that many so called 'healthy' compounds would have been lethal.
- Harvard
- US National Library of Medicine
But the evidence about cancer seems to be week indeed, I'll give you that.
From the first source given:
From the second:
Around cancer, from the third:
Intuitively, it seems like formaldehyde and formic acid being metabolites of aspartame would hint at there being something to find with a good look. Still, though, crazily enough, there's no "there" there.
Still, I wouldn't touch that shit until it's unequivocally proven as harmless.
It's unequivocal. I was weirdly disappointed too. There's more to worry about in the plastic bottles and environs than the artificial sweeteners.
Yep..And plastic is destroying wildlife on land and in water world wide..And it's screwing us up too.
It's funny to compare Europe and America's approaches to banning products for agricultural and human consumption. In Europe, if something is suspected to cause harm, it is first banned, and people who want to use/sell it have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it's harmless. In the USA, before something gets banned, people have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it causes harm, and then again, if a lobby representing anyone making money out of that product is strong enough, it may not get banned even if there is substantial proof that it's harmful!
Some places do have a salt tax! Other places wanted a sugar tax kind of like the coke tax but I don't know if they passed them.
They claim it's for the obesity problem, in truth it's probably like excise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, people are going to want it no matter what, so a small tax to the city or other government entity is a win to them. I claim I love the people, I'm just looking out for the kids but I'm actually using you to get monies!!!