A Griffith University study published in BMJ Public Health on Wednesday found a levy applied to non-alcoholic drinks with added sugar, such as soft drinks and most juices, could prevent 3.7 million cases of tooth decay, 191,000 cases of gum disease, and 115,000 cases of complete tooth loss across Australia over the next 25 years.
You are massively more likely to die of a preventable cause of death is you are on a low income. Increasing taxes on low income earners is only going to make them poorer and sicker.
So why not increase taxes on companies and higher income earners and increase wages and benefits?
Would prefer increased taxes on hoarded wealth assets than people who earn a “high” income. The asset hoarding class typically have near zero taxable income.
The article is literally about how a study found a tax on sugary drinks “could prevent 3.7 million cases of tooth decay, 191,000 cases of gum disease, and 115,000 cases of complete tooth loss across Australia over the next 25 years.”
That’s people being less sick.
I’d also note that making people less sick also makes them less poor, because they don’t have to pay the cost of dental and other health care (yes, it should be free, but it’s not)
If revenue raised by the tax is used to provide services to low income earners - e.g. subsidised dental care, subsidised fresh food - then low income earners could come out ahead.
Only if they no longer buy soft drinks, which means they don’t pay the tax, which means it doesn’t raise revenue.
Or they keep buying soft drinks, pay the tax, and end up even poorer which will increase the likelihood of further health issues.
You seem to be assuming a binary choice in consumption, but the modelling in the study was that those numbers for dental outcomes would be produced by a 24% reduction in consumption of sugar sweetened beverages.
From the SBS article:
So there would still be tax revenue from the remaining 76% of consumption. But it’s a public health measure, just via a tax, so if it produced no revenue that would (from a public health perspective) be considered a huge success. It makes sense that the amount of revenue you raise and can spend on dental health would scale in proportion to the amount of consumption and dental harm. It’s a way of partially de-externalising the health externalities of the sugar-sweetened beverage industry.
It’s of limited imparting also note that (1 + 0.2) x (1 - 0.24) = 0.912. So with a 20% tax, modelled to reduce consumption by 24%, on average people will be spending 9% less on sugar-sweetend drinks.
As pointed out by @observes_depths@aussie.zone, if the revenue is directly tied to funding dental care for poorer citizens, care which someone who maintains 100% of their consumption is more likely to need, then they may end up less poor than otherwise. Not only is their tax contribution going into that funding, but revenue from wealthier consumers and those who have reduced their consumption and are less likely to need dental care.
I’ve also seen proposals where the money is spent on subsidising fresh food, so that the average weekly shop comes out to the same dollar figure even if behaviour doesn’t change, while people are doubly incentivised to make healthier choices.
The SBS article also mentions that the tax can be designed to encourage reformulation of drinks, with drinks below a certain sugar concentration exempted from the tax, as happened in the UK:
So in the UK 90% of drinks are no more expensive to the consumer, but tax-incentivised reformulation has meant sugar consumption from sweetened beverages has decreased by nearly half! (Again, revenue raising is not the aim, the tax is just a policy ‘stick’.)
The study the SBS article is about also modelled for a similar level of reformulation:
A 300% greater health impact over the ‘base case’ (20% tax, 100% passed-on), and it’s hip-pocket neutral 90% of the time!
Your arguments can equally be applied to the tax on tobacco, but we know that applying a tax (to a point, it seems!) reduces tobacco consumption and the associated health harms, and provides revenue that makes up for the cost of tobacco-related disease to our health system.
A sugary beverages tax like the ‘base case’ (20% tax, 100% passed-on) would be similar to the tobacco tax and could be used to similar effects, but, as I hope I’ve made clear above, there’s lots of options.
Ok, but now there’s all this extra money from the sugar tax and even more from heath care savings, and that can be used to make a meaningful difference helping the poor.
Heavy emphasis on “can”. It’s a tax that punishes the poorest in our society today, with the promise that we might help them tomorrow. Both major parties have repeatedly shown that they do not care about these people, so I’m not sure why anyone would believe that a tax with the promise of reinvestment into low income health services is a believable answer.
You’re not wrong there, but making coke more expensive is hardly going to make anyone poorer.
The theory goes, If packaged junk food was more expensive then people would eat healthier packaged food. A tax on sugary drinks and a cap on bottled water prices is along those same lines.
Australian government sources say low income Australians are over 2 times more likely to die from preventable deaths than wealthier Australians. So the obvious way to improve health is remove regressive taxes, increase their incomes to track cost of living increases and do something about rents.
There are always classist do-gooders. Taking indigenous kids from their families. Putting welfare payments on cards to control spending. What they never want to do is lower rents and utilities or raise wages or benefits. The data is very clear. Poverty kills. Put a tax on one junk food and I guarantee supermarkets are going to increase their margins on healthier alternatives to match leaving everyone worse off. Shareholders are the only ones who benefit.
I agree colesworth would take advantage to increase profits.
I was living in the Alice when that basics card came in. The card would only work at grocery stores apparently but the truth was the grocery stores started selling things that were no longer groceries just to cash in on a captive market.
Levels of greed never cease to surprise.