Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has announced a March 9, 2010, webinar to discuss “the rationale, relevant science, and economic and policy considerations of soft drink taxes.” The conference will reportedly update participants about the latest developments in state and local policies since July 2009, when director Kelly Brownell presented the center’s first webinar on this topic. The Rudd Center has consistently supported taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages to “improve public health and generate considerable revenue for states, cities, and the nation,” according to its website.
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According to this article, pressure from the beverage industry has made policymakers think twice about imposing a tax on sugary beverages, which some have viewed as a way to address both revenue deficits and obesity. The reporters discuss how Congress has handled the issue since the Obama administration indicated an interest in the tax in 2009 and public health advocates testified before a Senate committee urging support for the proposal. They note how a coalition of business interests “operating under the name Americans Against Food Taxes,” quickly mobilized an array of organizations, including the National Hispanic Medical Association, to lobby against the tax. Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center on Food Policy and Obesity, apparently responded to the involvement of health groups in the industry initiative by saying, “It’s all about payback. Public health advocates ran into the same phenomena when seeking to increase taxes on tobacco.” The…
This article chronicles a growing movement among “normal weight folks” who have become “vocal, sometimes vehemently so, in their support for ‘sin taxes’ on junk foods and soda,” and who have “increasingly attacked, with words or actions, the overweight or obese.” Jameson quotes Douglas Metz, chief of health services for a San Diego-based company that offers wellness programs to employers, as saying: “Americans as a society are getting fed up with the matter of obesity. No doubt about it. Some pockets of society are taking positive action, and unfortunately others are taking negative action. That’s what happens when a society hasn’t figured out what the fix is.” Jameson cites several examples, including the recent unsuccessful plan of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania that sought the body mass index of every enrolling student and required the obese to lose weight or take a fitness class before they could graduate and the attempt…
New York Governor David Paterson (D) has released a 2010-11 executive budget proposal that calls for “a new excise tax of approximately one penny per ounce on sugared beverages linked to obesity ($465 million).” According to the proposal, which claims that obesity-related disease costs the state’s health care system $7.6 billion annually, the so-called soda tax “will discourage consumption of those unhealthy products and improve long-term health outcomes.” The legislature has until April 1, 2010, to enact a budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Past efforts to institute a levy on sugar-sweetened beverages have met with opposition. “[Paterson] has proposed a soda tax before, then caved, after orchestrated industry protests across the state,” noted a January 19 New York Times editorial that urged the governor to “resist and keep the tax.” In addition, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has praised the initiative, deeming it a “courageous…
A high tax on meat is needed for meat-eaters to consume less, ultimately resulting in multiple benefits to human health, animal welfare and the environment, writes Peter Singer, a Princeton University bioethics professor and author of Animal Liberation and co-author of The Ethics of What We Eat, in an October 25, 2009, guest column in the New York Daily News. He advocates a 50 percent tax on the retail value of meat, but “if it is not enough to bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.” Singer advocates a tax on all meat, fearing “a tax on red meat alone would merely push meat-eaters to chicken.” Americans, Singer writes, have “been ignoring the cow in the room. That’s right, cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption…
Venture capitalist and physician Mitchell Blutt, writing for Forbes.com, suggests that the rising cost of health care will lead inexorably to the stigmatization of unhealthy foods as the “new tobacco.” According to Blutt, unhealthy food will one day be “publicly identified as an addictive problem and perhaps even some day, deemed a drug.” He believes that government will likely impose taxes on unhealthy foods and beverages, described as those high in calories, such as soft drinks and snacks. He calls the “scientific data demonstrating the health hazards of excessively sugared beverages in children” compelling. But, while he acknowledges that “sin taxes” will reduce consumption of unhealthy foods, he does not believe that these trends will reduce the chronic diseases associated with obesity and poor diet. “That’s generations off,” he concludes. See Forbes.com, October 6, 2009.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has issued a paper claiming that a state tax on sugar-sweetened beverages “would yield billions of dollars in new revenue and counter the alarming risks of obesity, poor nutrition, and displacement of more healthful foods and beverages.” Echoing similar proposals published in the New England Journal of Medicine and by the Institute of Medicine, the CSPI report calls for “a modest new (or extra) tax of five cents per 12-ounce serving” that would nationally raise state revenues by “more than $7 billion annually, ranging from about $13 million in Wyoming to about $878 million in California.” The paper also includes a chart detailing “‘nickel-a-drink’ state revenue projections, based on national consumption data and pro rated for each state’s population.” “President Obama is exactly right when he says kids are drinking too much soda,” stated CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson in a September…
“It may take more than an analogy with tobacco to convince voters,” argues Daniel Engber in the first of two recent Slate articles questioning the effectiveness of a proposed federal tax on sugar-sweetened beverages and other “hyperpalatable” food products. Titled “Let Them Drink Water: What a Fat Tax Really Means for America,” the article asserts that state-levied soda taxes have thus far “turned out to be way too small to make anyone lose weight.” It states that any successful effort to deter consumption would require redefining soda as drug, not a beverage. “It’s hard to draw a line, though, between foods that are drugs and foods that are merely delicious,” opines Engber, who notes that under this regime, “Doughnuts are a drug; brioche is treat.” He concludes that fat taxes, which “[discriminate] among the varieties of gustatory experience,” would create an “apartheid of pleasure” that disproportionately affects those consumers most…
The chair of the California Senate’s Select Committee on Obesity and Diabetes has reportedly announced a November 2009 hearing to discuss the purported link between sweetened beverage consumption and obesity. An author of the state’s menu labeling laws, California Senator Alex Padilla (D-San Fernando Valley) issued the September 17, 2009, press release in response to a report published by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA) and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Titled Bubbling Over: Soda Consumption and its Link to Obesity in California, the study used data from the 2005 California Health Interview Survey to conclude that “41 percent of children (ages 2-11), 62 percent of adolescents (ages 12-17) and 24 percent of adults drink at least one soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage every day.” It also apparently found that “adults who drink one or more sodas or other sugar-sweetened beverages every day are 27 percent more likely…
The Urban Institute and the University of Virginia have issued a report claiming that lawmakers should study anti-tobacco campaigns as they consider taxing fattening foods and sugary drinks to curb the nation’s obesity problem. Titled “Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies from the Tobacco Wars,” the report asserts that increased education about smoking and taxing tobacco products brought the percentage of U.S. smokers down from 42.4 percent of the population in 1965 to less than 20 percent in 2007. Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, was quoted as saying that raising taxes “brings about the quickest, most measurable, and most pronounced decline in use.” Policies suggested in the report include (i) the adoption of excise or sales taxes on “fattening food,” such as ice cream, sugary drinks and candy; (ii) the placement of “clear and simple labels,” such as traffic-light signpost labels, “conveying the health risks of fattening foods”…
