Philadelphians Drink a Lot More Alcohol Since the City's Soda Tax Was Imposed | Hacker News Reader

Philadelphians Drink a Lot More Alcohol Since the City's Soda Tax Was Imposed

politicalcalculations.blogspot.com

59 pointskgwgk35 comments

Are they honestly suggesting a substitution effect between soda and liquor? God the Tax Foundation is ever more hackish than usual. The blog then continues to make an extended comparison to show how much more people are drinking:

> Of course, that's a ridiculous number, because Pennsylvania prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages to individuals under the age of 21. That prohibition blocks some 26% of the city's population from even being able to buy Icehouse beer, assuming that the law is actively enforced against Philadelphia residents under that age. If we do the back-of-the-envelope math to estimate how many extra equivalent 12-fluid-ounce bottles of Icehouse beer that Philadelphia's adult population is consuming, we come up with a monthly increase of 12.9 bottles per legal drinking-age Philadelphian, or over 154 bottles of Icehouse beer per adult in the city per year.

So adding 15 cents to the cost of a can of coke led people in Philly to drink 26 additional six-packs of beer annually?

Gee -- There's a huge spike in early 2018 that's really throwing that whole chart off. I wonder if anything else happened in Philly in early 2018 that would explain a huge spike in alcohol consumption:

https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/02/05/super-bowl-52-eagles-patri...

What does soda tax tax? Soda or sugar soda? I mean, is diet coke also taxed? In that case, what's the reason? If not, why is it called soda tax instead of sugar tax?

Has the tax affected strong liquours mixes? (not sure how do you call it, i mean whisky/ron/vodka/etc + soda) Then drinking beer would be a downsizing option.

Here's what it covers, straight from the City of Philadelphia's website [1]:

> What is taxed

> The tax is not just on sodas. This tax is on any non-alcoholic beverage, syrup, or other concentrate used to prepare a beverage that lists as an ingredient any form of caloric sugar-based sweetener, including, but not limited to sucrose, glucose, or high fructose corn syrup.

> Drinks considered “diet” or “zero calorie” are also taxed. Specifically, this tax is on any non-alcoholic beverage, syrup or other concentrate used to prepare a beverage that lists any form of artificial sugar substitute, including stevia, aspartame, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame potassium (Ace-K), saccharin, and advantame.

> Examples of sweetened beverages

> Soda (regular and diet); non-100%-fruit drinks; sports drinks; sweetened water; energy drinks; pre-sweetened coffee or tea; and non-alcoholic beverages intended to be mixed into an alcoholic drink.

[1] https://www.phila.gov/services/payments-assistance-taxes/bus...

What's the logic behind not taxing 100% juice? It has just as much sugar as a Coke; the fact the sugar comes from a grape/apple/guava etc changes one thing - it's now "naturally" sweetened sugar water.

As a guess, it is because whether or not the tax applies seems to be based on the ingredient list.

100% orange juice, for example, typically lists either just orange juice, or orange juice plus added vitamins. So, not taxed.

The less-than-100% juice drinks usually add sweeteners in addition to the sweetness that comes from the fruit juice. So, taxed.

Think they can bypass this by using concentrated juices as sweeteners?

> Drinks considered “diet” or “zero calorie” are also taxed.

That's nuts. I guess sugar providers lobbied that crap into the law to neuter it.

The soda tax is a tax on drinks sweetened with sugar. But it is taxed at the distribution level. Does the tax affect alcoholic drinks? Sure, but it is a tax per ounce. With alcoholic drinks being relatively small, and with a large markup, the tax is virtually invisible. The biggest problem with the tax is, because it is per ounce, and not a percentage it affects cheaper drinks more. The healthier drinks tend to be cheaper. A $2 bottle of coke is increased 20 cents or so, while a $2 jug of sweetened tea is doubled! It was called the soda tax because it targeted sodas. Here in Seattle they referred to it as the sugar tax, but they exempted milk based drinks. So drink up that milkshake, which is one of the worst calorie per ounce drink.

We have a sugar tax on drinks in the UK now but in my experience Coke and Pepsico just put all their prices up. Regular still costs the same as Diet/Zero, they're just paying more to government for it.

Not to mention all the calories the residents must be consuming from the massive spike in Philadelphia's Crisco consumption [1] in January 2018. The soda tax really affects everything!

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/sports/philadelphia-eagle...

also... article assumes that everyone drinks $7.99 / 12pack of Icehouse for its bottle consumption increase numbers.

yeah this is a stupid post.

I hate when I come to make a point and find someone else already has.

To wit: the linked article has turned an obvious outlier (postseason booze consumption due to the Eagle's unlikely playoff run) into "data" to make a fundamentally partisan point.

This isn't the worst example, though. I save this link to bring up in "misleading with outliers" discussions: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/07/worst-e... (Basically a decade old article where someone used Norway's very strange taxation regime due to the nationalized oil industry to "prove" the Laffer curve).

Is it just me or does this seem misleading? Highlighting an area on the graph before and after the enacted date seems to prime skimmers into seeing the trend the article wants to argue. On the other hand, making a line through the min and max over time (by eye) just shows an increasing trend from the beginning of the plot to the end.

EDIT: here you go https://imgur.com/a/Fh5T9LZ

That's a good point. Also, there's a huge spike in the "latter" highlighted part that may correspond to the Super Bowl win? I wonder if it's related.

Yeah, it's especially distorted because thet just average the 42 month period before and then the 18 month period after. They could, with e dame source data, average each of the seven 6-month period before, and each of the three 6-month periods after, which would make, which would make it clearer if the highly volatile measure was increasing over time before and if anything significant changed with the time at issue. (And even then, pretending that the event to which it is ascribed is the only relevant thing at that time is... dubious.)

The increase also coincides with the change in federal administrations, and any number of other significant events. The title is unnecessarily suggestive.

Edit: Someone else also pointed out the super bowl win, which is also a likely factor. You can probably make this data fit whatever narrative you want to sell.

Take a look at the City of Philadelphia's Department of Revenue annual report (https://www.phila.gov/media/20161122003302/2016-Annual-Repor...). Page 18 is the revenue from liquor tax since FY08. You'll see it's been rising steadily over that time. The Department of Revenue attributes this rise to better enforcement of tax collection (they say the same in their FY16 report as well). It certainly possible that some consumers are switching from buy soda to buying alcohol, but I don't think you can attribute all of the change in liquor tax revenue to the soda tax.

Not very familiar with this situation but it makes sense, the price increase on soda would bridge the gap between that and the price of a beer which would make the customer think twice if it might be worth it to spend a little bit more and get the more expensive option. It's like marketing pricing strategy but triggered by taxes and not a single company.

I started drinking diet soda because drinking regular soda like it was water was suboptimal. I drank regular soda because water in restaurants often tastes funny, or it comes out in tiny glasses that rarely get refilled. I hate coffee & tea. So when I stop drinking diet soda, I usually end up drinking more alcohol because I don't like or want everything else :P

Why do US cities have these taxes if the government isn’t on the hook for the related health issues anyway? Or are they?

This has got to be the most regressive tax ever invented... which is something of an "accomplishment".

Honestly, we should just outright ban soda. It's a colossal deadweight dragging down our healthcare system, it's nutritionally pointless, and it's not addictive enough to be worth trafficking.

You could say that about a lot of the crap in a supermarket. Twinkies, ice cream. I don’t get why soda has become demonized over those.

You shouldn't advocate for violence against people just because they have different tastes than you. It's usually socially unacceptable or against the rules.

How the hell is that advocating violence?

The force of law comes from the threat of violence against those found not in compliance.

If someone is not violating another party's rights, there's no moral justification for subjecting them to violence.

Yep.

People like cimmanom justify that violence by arguing that if people use shared resources to support their non-optimal health choices they're violating other people's rights indirectly. This is an absurd view but very common.

They often don't see it as advocating violence because the government has a monopoly on the use of force. But they really need to ask themselves if the damage done by government violence might very well be greater than the damage done by non-optimal health choices and potential future use of a share resource.

Or maybe they're just authoritarians and believe the government owns the people for the greater good.

It's not about tastes, it's about heathcare costs in a system where medicine is partly (and will likely one day be mostly or fully) socialized.

A casual stroll through a high-foot-traffic part of a low-income area in America makes starkly clear the absolute catastrophe sugar is wreaking on society.

It becomes a "system" when it stops being a marketplace. Then those systems are ruled by socialist directives. USSR had no Coke either.

Then we should have become the USSR when they banned original Four Loko ~7 years ago. Oh wait.

Well, had Pepsi

I wonder how the cost would change if we got rid of sugar subsidies.

In that sense, cigarette taxes are also regressive. But extremely high taxes on cigarettes have helped a lot of people quit and deterred people from starting to smoke in the first place. In the long run, that helps people avoid spending money on cigarettes at all. Not to mention the long term savings on health care.

It’s not like soda is something one can’t live without. If you can’t afford soda, drink water. It’s better for you and will also save you on health care costs in the long run.

On balance, the taxes may have played a role in decreasing smoking. It would be foolish to pretend that they didn't also play a role in some poor kids not getting new shoes for school or enough to eat during the summer. Some of us have enough empathy to care about that; for others humans are just economic knobs to be economically twisted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com