A gentleman who is soon to be unemployed as an economics professor tells us that the production and sale of Coca Cola is a sin:
If sin such a terrible thing when it comes in the form a can of Coke? Well, yes it is when the planet cannot afford that waste of resources, the product is laden with anti-competitive protections and potential tax loopholes, and it happens to have contributed to substantial increases in childhood (and other) obesity.
Most of the world is desperately trying to reduce the amount of sugar people eat. There are calls for taxes on anything which does contain sugar, several places – including the UK – have extra taxes on soda pop because of that sugar content and so on. That sugar consumption is already down from historical levels is something people seem keen not to acknowledge.
Then there’s people at the other end of the silliness spectrum like Malaysia.…
See MoreMuch is being made of this new study about Berkeley’s soda tax. That it has all been terribly successful, that lots of people are drinking very much less sugary pop and that this is all a great thing. No doubt we’ll have health experts along in a moment to tell us all about that. From our point of view here this does have an item of interest – such sugar taxes are definitely, definitively, regressive. They really do weigh more heavily upon the poor.…
See MoreThere are indeed legitimate functions for the government to perform in a modern economy. There are even ones useful enough in one still not modern like Tanzania. Determining the exact source of sugar supply not being among them. In fact, having anything other than the most very general oversight of sugar supply being beyond government competence.
This not being a lesson that the Government of Tanzania has learnt:
Tanzania has now backtracked on its decision to ban sugar importation, a week after freezing the issuance of permits.
India has just raised the minimum selling price for sugar in a bid to undo the problems caused by an earlier decision by the very same Indian government. This isn’t really quite the way to do it – better to undo that earlier mistake, not compound matters. But as we so often say around here, election time, who has the ability to be reasonable?
So, the news itself:
The government’s move to increase the minimum selling price of sugar will augur well for the mills and is expected to increase their operating profit margins by 6 percent, says a report.
Philadelphia has tried out that soda pop tax for us all and we can see how it’s going, The result is that it’s just the perfect form of taxation. The richer among us avoid it entirely, the poor end up paying it all and as no one is changing their soda pop consumption it raises lots of money. As Marie Antoinette would point out to us this makes it just the perfect form of taxation, doesn’t it?…
See MoreWe’ve a quite lovely revival of the most paranoid theory concerning why we’re all so damn fat these days. Obesity is caused by the capitalists deliberately making us fat. No, really, they make unhealthy food, advertise it to us, get us to eat it, we all become fat and they laugh all the way to the bank:
… See MoreWhile allowing junk food manufacturers to use highly sophisticated techniques to overcome our impulse controls, the government berates people for becoming obese.
It can be difficult to catch up with what it is that we’re all supposed to be doing, so contradictory are the claims being made. For example, we’re told that obesity is the very devil of our age and that it will consume the entire NHS unless something is done about it. This is wrong, of course, as fatty lardbuckets pop earlier thereby reducing their costs to the NHS and the taxpayer. But still, that’s the argument made.…
See MoreTo explain this part of Indian economic management it’s only necessary to understand that growing sugar cane is a small scale farm matter. Sugar mills are a much larger scale industrial matter. There are therefore many more votes in favouring the farmers than there are the processors. With that, and only that, how do we think that a government would price things? Yes, quite, cane prices would continually rise, to the point that the mills consistently make a loss.…
See MoreWe have, as we know, an epidemic of diabetes these days. Swathes of the population are blowing up like balloons, limbs falling off gangrenous and eyeballs failing as the modern diet and obesity kill us all. Thus sugar taxes, no advertising of junk food and, in one recent argument, no free trade with the Americans.
Hmm, well, that is interesting. Because there’s a recent finding that the BCG vaccine, the one against tuberculosis, is a reasonable enough cure for Type 1 diabetes, and might well be useful against Type 2 as well.…
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