Here’s my list of taxes passed (!) and pending (?). Have I missed any? Please inform.
Healthy Food America has a handy map.
Addition: Bloomberg News has its own roundup
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:
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:
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
Here are the documents
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:
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
The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut has a new study out on the Howard County Unsweetened campaign.
The study’s key findings:
The study attributes the success of the campaign to its policy work:
It also notes community-wide public health outreach efforts:
This was a big effort. Big efforts pay off.
The documents
From Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), procurement resources for vendors
From the Center for Ecoliteracy, produce lesson plans for kids in grades 3-5
From Salud America
The Urban Institute has just published The Pros and Cons of Taxing Sweetened Beverages Based on Sugar Content.
The report is funded by the American Heart Association and others. The AHA issued a press release.
The sections of the report state its conclusions:
The report concludes:
We conclude that taxing based on the amount of added sugar a drink contains, either by taxing sugar content directly or by levying higher volume taxes on drinks with more sugar, is feasible in many jurisdictions and reduces sugar consumption more effectively than comparable taxes on drink volume.
Broad-based volume or sales taxes on all soft drinks, however, raise revenue more efficiently.
Federal, state, and local policymakers thus face trade-offs between using sweetened-beverage taxes to raise revenue and to discourage consumption of added sugars.
Keep this in mind when trying to do this in your community.
The results, now almost final, look like this:
And
Recall what this cost, and then some:
Next? Fingers crossed.
But at least this.
