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this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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I don't want more sin taxes. Sin taxes are anti choice. Subsidizing products that's meet the healthy label I could agree with though
Edit: aka subsidizing the crops that are used to produce and possibly writing laws to ban the taxation on foods labeled healthy. Thus making such food in states like I live cost 10% less just by banning the state taxes on them before even getting to the subsidization on the crops. Shit, forcing us to move off corn to things like sugar cane would be great. Dense, the crop cycles are better, water usage is less and overall would be easier to manage. As in if we are going to kill ourselves with gas powered cars using 10% ethanol from corn... Why not use 10% from sugarcane which is easier to acquire and better for the population long term
I think sin taxes are absolutely acceptable if the government is also fully paying for the healthcare of all citizens (which we should totally be doing).
The combination of the two would make America a much healthier place overall.
I'm in the UK, we have the NHS, and several "sin taxes", and they still pretty much exclusively penalise the poor (as does the NHS which has been defunded to oblivion in favour of rampant privatisation, so those who can't afford to go private are left with the ruins), while those selling the "sinful" products (and private health insurance) continue to rake it in.
There is no taxing or legislating or regulating our way our of capitalism, which is exclusively responsible for those in power exchanging the health and well being of the population and the planet for profit, and they will never allow any tax or legislation or regulation to pass that would put them at any kind of disadvantage. The fact that some people still think they would, is frankly quite terrifying.
Yes… these kinds of taxes are regressive, in that they cost poor people more than they do wealthy people
So since they aren't...
Right… and your comment was in reply to someone merely proposing taxes that don’t exist yet either…
They don’t think the US does, they think it should. You don’t need to be so aggressive about it.
I was an asshole, yeah. Sorry mate
So you're supportive of Canadian sin taxes on sugar? Obviously America is broken as shit but let's look at a less fundamentally awful example. Canada has a (granted smaller) issue with obesity and the costs of supporting long term care for it - a sin tax on sugar that helps support the Canadian healthcare system due to the outsized costs obesity causes.
Half of them are only cheap because of heavily subsidized corn being heavily processed into an inordinately cheap sugar substitute.
Taxes aren't really raising prices so much as undoing the subsidies distorting the market.
So your saying the sales taxes are like tariffs, as they are being used to spread the cost to all purchasers without reguard to income making them harm lower and middle class people more, without ever having to raise taxes back to reasonable levels for the high income members of society. (3 million a year+)
I'm not saying anything about sales tax.
I'm saying that if you tax foods high in corn syrup, you're just making it cost what it's supposed to cost. You're literally subsidizing the least healthy food at the moment.
Yeah tax on food is strange. It's 0% in Florida for unprepared food, 10% in Tennessee.
I think that’s common. Here in Massachusetts, sales tax does not apply to food ingredients, but prepared food is taxed, and in many places they add a ”hospitality tax” to fleece the tourists and anyone going someplace popular
In Florida corn syrup isn't taxed at 0% it's taxed below 0% because it's already gone through layers of subsidies.
Denmark instituted a sugar tax and that seemed to have very positive effects (manufacturers reduced the sugar content in various products, better health outcomes). It makes sense in countries with socialised health care systems that you'd make the people that end up costing more due to behaviours pay more into it.
Sin taxes are an incredibly effective way to reflect externalities of actions... sin taxes on offensive goods with no healthy malady are dumb as fuck - but we should be making sure that consumers are seeing a more accurate cost for expensive consumption habits. In an ideal world those revenues would be earmarked for programs to counter the societal harm (i.e. buying a pack of cigarettes would come with essentially a payroll style tax that'd fund smoking cessation programs) but America is currently deeply dysfunctional.
I'd be okay with that. The key thing is we need to do more than we're currently doing because the system is broken