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California lawmaker lobbies for sweetened-beverage tax
Bottles of Snapple ice tea and juice drink are displayed along with bottles of Coke at the Fog Hill Market in San Francisco,
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BOB MOON: There's a move here in California to have the state to jump on the nationwide bandwagon for a new kind of "sin tax." And, we've got LA Times consumer columnist David Lazarus in the studio to talk about it. Good morning, David.
DAVID LAZARUS: Good morning.
MOON: So what is California proposing here?
LAZARUS: Well, a California law maker William Monning is proposing a penny-per-ounce tax on sweetened beverages. You're talking soda, you're talking sports drinks, you're talking energy drinks.
MOON: Isn't this going to hit low income people the hardest?
LAZARUS: Well, probably, because many studies show that lower income communities and minority communities tend to be some of the highest users of soda pop. On the other hand, if that's where the obesity crisis is biggest, perhaps that's where you need to target. And right now, what we're seeing is black communities, Latino communities, have disproportionally higher levels of obesity. And over all in America, two-thirds of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese right now, so the problem is profound.
MOON: Now this amounts to a "sin-tax." Do we know how effective it's been in other states that have instituted this?
LAZARUS: You know it varies with that sort of thing. For example in 2009, The New England Journal of Medicine said that these sorts of taxes are a very good way to combat the obesity crisis. On the other hand last year the Rand Corporation came out with a report that said soda taxes that are at their current levels of about 4 percent or so, are not really going to do the job. People will simply pay that extra amount for their sugar fix. On the other hand, Rand found that if you had a soda tax on the 18 percent range, or 18 cents for every dollar, that would have a big impact.
MOON: But a few pennies, does that really discourage consumption? I mean I'm already paying, in some cases, $5 or $6 for a six-pack of sugar water.
LAZARUS: All true, and you'll probably pay whatever you want if you want your fix. On the other hand, if our goal is to try and create resources that would give Americans just better opportunities to be physically fit -- bike paths, basketball quarts, gym memberships -- well that money has to come from somewhere and as with all sin-taxes, you're taking a negative behavior and trying to turn it into a positive.
MOON: Brace yourself, huh, if you're really into that sugar fix.
LAZARUS: Or get up and take a walk.
MOON: David Lazarus is consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Thanks for joining us.
LAZARUS: Thank you.
If our goal is to improve the health of Californians and decrease the obesity rate, taxing soda is not the answer. We know that implementing a soda tax will not improve the overall long-term lifestyle factors that affect obesity. As a registered dietitian, I believe that the obesity epidemic is a complicated issue that has many causes and no one food or beverage can be blamed. My experience consulting food and beverage companies, including Coca-Cola, and counseling overweight individuals and families leads me to believe that education and community organizing are critical to improving the outlook on obesity. I see sedentary lifestyle, lack of family meals, and excessive portion sizes as significant contributing factors to weight issues today. Increased access to healthy foods, especially in lower income communities where farmers markets and grocery stores are few and far between, is another important area to focus on. A soda tax will not improve the health of our communities and would place an unnecessarily burden on lower income families and small businesses.
@Lissa Martinez: In this economy, I just refill those water bottles and save a LOT! I refill jugs of water from one of the fancy water filtering vending machines. It's green in more ways than one.
BTW, as an ex-smoker (I didn't quit because of price but because I suddenly thought I could), it thrills me to raise taxes on a product that I don't use, just like so many others used to do to me.
I listened to the story and I think that you and every other report are missing the other main element of these drinks. They all are sold in individual serving containers, and there are a lot of those bottles being emptied each day. That's a lot of personal trash being generated that somebody needs to collect, haul and properly dispose. It's also another chance to littler anonymously and people do it all the time.
I clean creeks in the public parks in San Antonio, and these beverage bottles are much of what the volunteers are pulling out of the waterways. In fact, we've held 6 cleanups over the winter and we've barely made a dent in some of the massive accumulations of plastic bottles that clog the small creeks. Glass bottles, being so much heavier, usually don't float far, but people seem to leave the screw tap on the empty bottle, so we do find those as well. None of those have yet had a message in the bottle, but it sure proves that the old basics of flotsam and jetsam still work to move buoyant objects when the waters move.
Yes, water bottles are also in the waterways, so the sugary drinks are not alone in polluting the waterways. The vast expansion of single serving drinks, mostly in plastic bottles, is a major solid waste disposal problem and a pollution problem when these containers are just left on the ground or tossed out of vehicles, which we see all the time. So, perhaps the real sugar tax seems like a nanny tax example. Instead, I suggest we look at the whole picture of these drinks and impose a waste/pollution tax on single serving drinks. It's an old tired idea, no longer trendy, but I'm so tired of fishing these things out of the parks creeks and flood plains. Pictures available if you want to see them.
