Search results: soda tax

When I was in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago, I met Dechen Tsering who works with Health, Housing and Community Services for that city.  She keeps an eye on what’s happening with the revenues collected from the city’s soda tax.

She sent me a link to the soda tax Website.

It’s full of useful information about the tax and what is happening with it.

Since 2015, the Berkeley City Council has allocated a total of $5 million from the General Funds for community agency grants and Public Health Division staffing to support the Healthy Berkeley Program. The funded programs aim to reduce consumption of all sugar-sweetened beverages.

If you want to know which organizations are getting tax funds in 2017, take a look here.

And here’s more than you ever wanted to know:

1. Complete SSB Tax Ordinance.

2. Glossary of definitions.

3. FAQs about the SSB tax.

4. SSB tax revenue 10.20.2015

5. SSB tax revenue 2.9.2016

6. SSB tax revenue 5.2.2016

7. SSB tax revenue 3.29.2017

8. SSB tax forms and instructions

Impressive, no?  A bright ray of sunshine for the weekend.

A group of Canadian health organizations has issued a report on the health and economic impacts of sugary drink consumption, based on research they commissioned..

The research predicts dire effects if sugary drink consumption is not curtailed—more than $50 billion in health care costs over the next 25 years.

The report says that Canadians purchased an average of 444 ml of sugary drinks per day in 2015, well over the recommended sugar maximum of no more than 10% of total daily calories.

Sales of classic Coke and Pepsi are down, but look what is happening with other sugary beverages:

• Energy drinks              +638%
• Sweetened coffees      +579%
• Flavoured water         +527%
• Drinkable yogurt        +283%
• Sweetened teas            + 36%
• Flavoured milk            + 21%
• Sports drinks               +  4%

The report estimates that a 20 per cent excise levy on sugary drinks will do wonders for health, and will account for government revenue of $1.7 billion per year.   These revenues could support healthy living initiatives such as

• Subsidies for fruits and vegetables
• Healthy school lunch programs
• Public education
• Food literacy and skills education
• Physical activity initiatives
• Food security, safe drinking water, low-fat milk in Indigenous communities

Here are the documents

• Download the summary report
• Download the full report
• Download the call to action

If you are having trouble keeping up with articles about soda taxes, you are not the only one.  I’m trying to do this by dealing with one city at a time.  Here’s what’s come in recently about what’s happening in Philadelphia:

• The Mayor’s office has a summary of what the tax does.
• Fifteen health organizations have filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the tax and in opposition to the beverage industry’s lawsuit.  Here’s their press release.  And here’s the brief.
• Philadelphia Says Beverage Tax Has Created Over 250 Jobs For Pre-K Program
• Tom Frieden, former CDC director and former Commissioner of the New York City Health Department, says these taxes work
  ShopRite says the tax will result in layoffs
• Health Commissioner Thomas A. Farley says Philly’s beverage tax is working

Children are getting educated in prekindergarten. The city is taking the first steps toward a massive rebuilding of parks, recreation centers, and libraries. Nine community schools are helping students and their families. The city is meeting its revenue projections, and the soda industry says sugary drinks sales have declined…The soda industry claims that sales declines are forcing them to lay off hundreds of workers. This same industry spent $10 million and made plenty of misleading claims trying to kill the tax and is now funding a lawsuit against the city over it, so we should be skeptical of any unverifiable numbers they put out. It’s particularly tough to accept their claim that they have to lay off workers now, when they are still spending hundreds of thousands on advertising, lobbyists, and lawyers.

Addition

• Temple University blames increase in meal costs on soda tax

Who knew that such things existed, let alone that they would be directed at anti-obesity and pro-soda tax advocates.

The New York Times reports that frightening messages about their families (the article gives examples) were sent to the advocates with links

laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to the New York Timeslast year.

Supposedly, this Group sells “tools only to governments for criminal and terrorism investigations.”  These can “trace a target’s every phone call, text message, email, keystroke, location, sound and sight.”

As the Times gently puts it, this discovery “raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.”

Citizen Lab has more information about this situation.

The spyware targeted these individuals:

• Dr. Simon Barquera is a well-respected researcher at the Mexican Government’s Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (National Institute of Public Health).
• Alejandro Calvillo is the Director of El Poder del Consumidor, a consumer rights and health advocacy organization.
• Luis Encarnación is the Director of the Coalición ContraPESO, a coalition of more than 40 organizations that work on obesity prevention and reduction strategies.  All three individuals work to support Mexico’s soda tax.

I am leaving on Wednesday for three weeks on a Fulbright to the National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca and hope to find out a lot more about this.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here’s a tweet from someone I don’t know (I like the soda cans).

Late addition:  Gary Ruskin sends his paper on corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations.  

The results, now almost final, look like this:

Soda tax votes in California:

• San Francisco, CA, Measure V, 1 cent/oz: 62%
• Oakland, CA, Measure HH, 1 cent/oz:       61%
• Albany, CA, Measure 01, 1 cent/oz:          71%

And

• Boulder, CO, Measure 2H, 2 cent/oz:       54%

Recall what this cost, and then some:

Next?  Fingers crossed.

But at least this.

Jennifer Falbe and other investigators from Kristin Madson’s group at UC Berkeley have just produced an analysis of the effects of the Berkeley soda tax on consumption patterns.

They surveyed people in low-income communities before and after the tax went into effect.  The result: an overall 21% decline in reported soda consumption in low-income Berkeley neighborhoods versus a 4% increase in equivalent neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco.

The Los Angeles Times breaks out these figures: 

In Oakland and San Francisco, which have not yet passed a tax, sales of regular sodas went up by 10%.

Other findings, as reported by Healthy Food America:

• During one of the hottest summers on record, Berkeley residents reported drinking 63 percent more bottled water, while comparison cities saw increases of just 19 percent.
• Only 2 percent of those surveyed reported crossing city lines to avoid the tax.
• The biggest drops came in consumption of soda (26%) and sports drinks (36%).

Agricultural economist Parke Wilde at Tufts views this study as empirical evidence for the benefits of taxes.  He writes on his US Food Policy blog that it’s time for his ag econ colleagues to take the benefits of taxes seriously:

There is a long tradition in my profession of doubting the potential impact of such taxes…Oklahoma State University economist Jayson Lusk, who also is president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), has blogged several times about soda taxes, agreeing with most of the Tamar Haspel column  in the Washington Post, and concluding stridently: “I’m sorry, but if my choice is between nothing and a policy that is paternalistic, regressive, will create economic distortions and deadweight loss, and is unlikely to have any significant effects on public health, I choose nothing” (emphasis added).

Wilde points out that Lusk has now modified those comments in a blog post.

All that said, I’m more than willing to accept the finding that the Berkeley city soda tax caused soda consumption to fall. The much more difficult question is: are Berkeley residents better off?

Yes, they are.

The Berkeley study is good news and a cheery start to the week.  Have a good one.

Addition

Politico adds up the “piles of cash” being spent on the soda tax votes in San Francisco, Oakland, and Alameda and analyzes the soda industry’s framing of the tax as a “grocery tax.”

I’m at the Summer Academy in Global Food Law and Policy in Getxo, Spain speaking about Soda Politics and was happy to see Healthy Food America’s analyses of how Philadelphia passed a soda tax.

Jim Krieger starts out with a reminder that all cities are different and all politics is local, but in this case Philadelphia did an outstanding job on the

• Political path: a budget proposal to be passed by the City Council
• Timing: end of budget speech while still a new mayor
• Framing: source of revenue to fund pre-K
• Community base: a coalition
• Financial support: Bloomberg and Arnold foundations
• Media buzz
• An effective champion in Mayor Jim Kenney  

All of these are essential elements in any advocacy campaign.

Casey Hinds, also of Healthy Food America, focuses on why Mayor Kenney’s messaging was so effective.  She quotes from his

• Interview in the New York Times
• Response to Bernie Sanders’ criticisms
• His interview with Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich

This last interview is particularly inspiring.  He knew what he was doing, and why.

KENNEY: It never was a grocery tax. From my perspective and my opinion, their miscalculation is that they thought the people were stupid and that they would totally eat the idea of a grocery tax. In the end, diet [beverages] became part of it because it was part of the negotiation to get us the nine votes or the 13 votes we needed. It was always about sugar-sweetened beverages. It was never about anything else. I think people recognize that this was a way to generate significant revenue without raising their real estate taxes, without raising their wage taxes, without raising business taxes, because those are all the taxes that we’ve always [used] to fund education.

…BOTTEMILLER EVICH: So when the other cities, states, call you, what are you going to tell local officials about going down this road?

KENNEY: Tie it to initiatives that the public wants. Build a coalition around those initiatives. And just continue to grow the coalition and don’t worry about the big money. It’s clear now that the big money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

We need more politicians like this.

Of course, it’s not over yet.