New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well(thecounter.org) |
New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well(thecounter.org) |
Soda consumption has been on a long decline since the late aughts. I even noticed as much anecdotally - often when dining out I would be the only one or maybe one of two to order a soda at all.
I'm completely willing to be proven wrong, but the data set is much too small to conclude anything either way. Why not include the top x cities, instead of just one 200 miles away? Because it rains a lot in both?
> Last year, researchers at the University of Washington found that low-income families in particular saw a significant decrease in soda consumption following the implementation of the tax. The findings were based on a survey of residents, meaning that it relied on self-reporting, which is less accurate than sales data.
This leads to interesting policy questions. For example, some people might complain that the tax is regressive and hits poorer families harder. A rebuttal to this is that obesity is also regressive, and if you wish to fight obesity you need to change behaviors of the people whom it afflicts. One way around this knotty issue is to take the money from this tax and use it for public services that disproportionally benefit the populations from whom it is generated. (I have no idea what the tax revenues in Seattle are used for.)
And now you've created a bureaucracy that can only maintain its existence if sugary drinks continue to sell well.
Which I think, isn't really caused by their low-income, but by their greater preference for soda.
Demand changes at the margin, so a $.20 increase is a $.20 increase to everyone. It depends how much you value the soda in the first place.
You can find the source here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100856
To quote from it:
> Portland, OR, was selected as the comparison site for Seattle, WA, based on Mahalanobis distance matching to evaluate the four largest municipalities in each of Washington and Oregon as potential comparison sites [etc]
They had more of a reason and included the model they used to pick the city.
It's also quite beneficial to keep the areas somewhat near in that there will be less variance in the number of item codes between close locations (i.e. different drinks are sold on the east coast vs west coast since some brands are local)
From a different section:
> Custom-ordered data were provided from store outlets geocoded within the boundaries of the taxing jurisdiction of Seattle, WA, the comparison site, Portland, OR
I suspect they didn't have enough funding to afford more geocoded scanner data given that it sounds like they had to pay for custom data at a rate per-geocoded location... or didn't have the funding to process that much more data.
It wasn't clear how much of the dataset labeling was manual, but it sounded like the study's authors may have had to sift through several thousand barcodes by hand.
> The data set itself—gathered by marketing insight firm Nielsen—was huge, representing 45 percent of all food store sales in the city for 2017, 2018, and 2019.
One thing I’m curious about is whether they looked at adjacent cities. Seattle isn’t exactly an island, did the soda purchases just shift outside the city?
Did they look at restaurants and coffee shops or only grocery sales?
How can this possibly be your argument? Are you suggesting that prices have no effect on consumption when there are high prices in a completely different market? Your default hypothesis has to be that higher prices lead to lower consumption.
So it's possible that people just substituted from regular to diet soda, and still eat just as much.
1: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/washington/articles/...
2: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/07/1044010...
If I still drank sugary soda, I'd go out of my way to avoid this tax.
I find the idea people alter their shopping habits to avoid it totally believable. probably not enough to offset the reduced consumption (or else it'd show up in lower gross receipts at stores within city limits), but it wouldn't be surprising to see increased sales in neighboring towns.
People don't think logically so long as they feel like they're saving money.
“I am uncritically accepting a study that says a 1.75 cents/oz tax was successful in changing consumer behavior because the additional burden it added to the cost of soda.”
You can’t have it both ways, claim the tax influenced behavior in terms of reducing consumption but not in terms of circumventing the tax.
20-ounce bottle of Coke: $2.50 --> $2.85.
2 liter (72-ounce) bottle of Coke: $2.70 --> $3.96.
If you drink a lot of soda, it can definitely add up.
(Alternatively, they did raise the price of all sodas, sugared or not, but I haven't seen much of that.)
This means that in the 5 households Nielsen used as a "representative sample of Seattle's population" one person got so overweight that he can't leave his flat any more and therefore he started buying his daily dose of soda online instead of buying it in his favourite store. Soda consumption drops by 20%. At least this is what Nielsen says. But hey, who am I to judge decades of financially successful quackery...
Once more of these policies have been in place for a few years, some will likely be repealed. At that point, a study of similar magnitude to analyze to what degree the habit changes are permanent will be even more interesting.
Wow, this is nakedly self interested and a law purely for the industry at the expense of democracy, how on earth can that be allowed to happen?
Note that the initiative banned "local government entities from imposing any new tax, fee, or other assessment on grocery items" in general, not just from sugary drinks.
I guess people did not want more expensive groceries. This may in the future be compensated by more expensive healthcare, but such is the human species. Short term gain > long term loss.
The problem is there are a lot of assumptions being made about the choice to buy a soda in any given situation. Someone in my family, for example, has type 1 diabetes, and occasionally (not usually; they control it well) needs something sugary for weird situations to regulate their blood sugar.
On average the state might gain from some policy, but is it always in the best position to understand what is in the best interests of the individual?
I guess I've never understood the focus on sugary beverages in particular. Why not candy? Pastries? Sugary cereal? Seems arbitrary and capricious to me.
The Seattle sugar tax is flawed. It is charged per ounce not a flat percentage. Typically more expensive drinks have more sugar but are actually effected less. Throw in the fact that milk based drinks are exempt, like the sugar rich milkshake, and this is a flawed law.
Does the soda tax go towards increasing public health services in the region?
The majority of the proceeds are supposed to go into expanding access to healthy food a well as education, asking other things
Armed with three years of grocery shopping data, researchers found that total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases.
If they could prove that it would be an incredible breakthrough in public policy, but I wouldn't bet on it. The science on the effect of sugar in the diet, sugar in and of itself, is far more eqquivocal than popular press would make you believe. It is exceedingly likely that people just ate more fat instead of sugar, which is plausibly just as dangerous as sugar when one is eating calories in excess of daily energy requirements.
Having substituted all soda with clear water, humanity has entered a new era of peace and prosperity. War is a thing of the past now that Man is hydrated.
Peace reigns over the Earth as fusion powered reactionless spacecraft take to the skies. Our third space colony is prospering and we are on the brink of conquering Death itself.
The problem with this sort of strategy is that we make laws by voting, and so it assumes that we can determine what is healthy by popular vote. This isn't true and it is very easily corrupted if the option is open.
A process like the one that throw out Barack Obama -> Donald Trump -> Joe Biden as the best candidates to lead the US should not be the process that decides what is and isn't healthy to eat. That isn't a reliable process. It is going to get corrupted by special interests. You should be using a different process (maybe using evidence?). And as an aside it could be argued that taxes are a bad tool if we think there is overwhelming evidence something is unhealthy. It creates weird incentives.
The saying goes that the price is right when the customer curses but still signs the contract. So I wouldn't be too sure about that.
Besides the effect is statistical. The reason people buy less sugary sodas might equally be attested to grocers and wholesalers simply filling their stores with more diet sodas, instead of sugary sodas, due to the tax—and not because consumers actually avoid sugary sodas due to the very slight price increase. So there still isn't a clear cause and effect.
This is important, because if it's the former, and the state claims it's the latter, then either they're clearly wrong about the cause and effect, or they're lying; either of which would be bad for public relations. On the other hand, the end result is pretty much the same, but if the effect is due to availability, then perhaps the whole thing could have been solved with regulation instead of taxation.
On the side comes the matter of what the taxed money is used for. Does it go towards better public health care in the region, or is it simply spent on covering various deficits. This is also important, because if the goal is to fight obesity, then how is it morally right to spend the tax profits on other things?
For further discussion on this study (and others like it) I highly recommend the stronger by science podcast [1]. And [2] is a link to the study details (to avoid whatever misleading spin npr might be giving it).
[1] https://www.sbspod.com/episodes/reverse-dieting-bodybuilding... (starts around 1:49:39, it's the second last topic)
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
So, yes, if it is not water, with or without CO2, it should be ingested with caution.
Only immediately obvious caveat is that the sample size may be a bit small:
> 19 healthy lean (BMI = 20.0 – 24.9) and 12 obese (BMI = 30.0 – 39.9) individuals 18 to 50 years old
Why do you believe this is so likely? To be honest I don't see the connection. People notice in the supermarket that their favorite soft drink became more expensive, and decide to switch to eating an extra hamburger instead?
This is only better if the thing you replace the soda with is better for you than the soda. Without any data on what that is, you don't know if that's true.
1. Increase burden of scientific evidence/cast scientific evidence in doubt by saying it's not conclusive enough
2. Assert that reducing sugar is not working because people will just get their calorie input otherwise.
3. Blame fat/daemonize fat, that's what the sugar industry has done very successfully over the last decades.
I'm rejecting the type of argument, because they do not foster an honest debate. It's really classic FUD.
[Edit]: some further clarification
Even though zero calorie soda does not directly contain any energy, it may mess up our feelings of hunger and make us more hungry. [0] So far, scientific studies indicate that people who switch from sugary soda to zero calorie drinks do not lose weight [1].
Feelings of hunger and satiety are complicated, driven by hormones and only somewhat correlated with total energy intake.
[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/medical-myths-all-...
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/zero-weight-loss-from-ze...
Edit: downvoted for what? Linking to Harvard health blog? If zero calorie soda had a slimming effect, we would have seen it a long ago, it is not exactly a new invention.
i.e. If the actual goal was reducing weight, then the obvious thought is all weight increasers should be taxed, not just sugar.
A lot of richer people in Seattle avoid sugar as a matter of health, but they pay for it since non-sugar sweetener drinks like super coffee are more expensive. The sugar tax is more aimed down market.
When one drops sugar consumption, it’s generally not replaced by fat. That’s not how obesity usually works.
i'm jesting of course, but the modern tax system tend to be both a revenue generator, while also being a behaviour modifier, often to the detriment of each of those objectives. I think root cause targeting, rather than try to "incentivize" at the edges, is more effective a social policy.
Well, we don't really know of any better option for taking collective decisions of high impact. The public and their representatives are informed of the science (and for nutrition information, it's really much more "science" than science at this point) and they decide by voting whether they choose to believe the data presented enough to try to impose tax burdens or other regulations.
What alternative is there? Have nutritionists be able to unilaterally decide what stores are allowed to sell and at what prices? That would get much more easily corrupted, as many nutrition studies have been in the past.
You could let people who think soda is unhealthy avoid it, and people who don't care buy it from the soda makers. Maybe set up some official nutritional advice [0].
There doesn't have to be a centralised determination on whether soda is to be encouraged or discouraged.
[0] https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/the-austral...
For my part, I know that teenager-me would have absolutely noticed this price increase, but adult me would not.
it is a german diploma thesis.
8.2 ff.
Basically they say that piglets prefer sweet taste and regular sugar is too expensive. So they can feed bitter tasting junk sweetened artificially.
Now one can certainly make a good argument that people are not fully rational and often do not consider fuel and time costs when looking for the cheapest deal, but that's not what you did.
Second, if the point was that driving further can’t save money, it’s flat out wrong because the cost of the driving is largely independent of the tax savings. Eg a single trip to stockpile.
>But the researchers didn’t stop there. They also wanted to know if shoppers might be getting sugar from other foods instead—a possibility that soda tax opponents have argued would become commonplace. Were Seattle residents simply swapping out Mountain Dew for candy bars? To find out, the researchers also analyzed sales data for untaxed drinks like flavored milk, sweets—which the team defined to include candies, desserts, and baked goods—as well as loose sugar. Over the course of months, Powell’s team painstakingly coded each product sold by its sugar content, and then calculated just how much sales of these products changed after the soda tax went in place.
>They found a slight increase in sugar consumed through untaxed drinks in 2018, which then dissipated in 2019. They also noticed a small, sustained increase in sugar consumed through sweets. In both cases however, those upticks were not large enough to overcome the significant reduction in sugar sold through taxed drink
So they did exactly what you asked for and found that while there was a small increase in sugar intake through other means, it was much less than the decrease from reduced sugar intake from soda.
Why are you not accusing the OP of not having an argument?
But the thing is, it was an argument, in terms of specifying a logical mechanism by which the conclusion would be unwarranted, even if the evidence doesn't bear it out in the way OP needs. And it's on you to make more substantive contributions than "you pattern-match to bad people" if you're going to respond at all.
I replied to you rather than the OP because your comment more obviously doesn't belong here. A culture of "you're wrong because you sound like bad people" is more toxic to this forum that a dubious counterpoint. (cf. "You know who else went vegetarian?")
I'm perfectly ok with someone giving actual arguments (ideally backed up by some scientific evidence) why that study might get the correct result. I didn't even make any judgement about the validity of the original conclusions.
What if they spend it on cigarettes?
Reduced dietary sugar (particularly the added sugars) is an amazing public health outcome.
Also, Starbucks is exempt.
Maybe they bought candy and cigarettes.
But if cigarettes are the thing preventing people from buying heroin with the money you deterred them from using to buy soda, that doesn't mean that the soda money is going someplace better than it was before your law, it only implies that "well then we just need a higher tax on cigarettes" wouldn't be a beneficial solution.
> This isn't the right definition of success. The first minimal requirement for this to be a successful initiative is that the community lost weight overall. Or even gained weight, but more slowly than other communities.