Vice taxes
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Cupcakes are bad, bad, bad!
TL;DR - About 1/2 to 2/3 down there is an image of cupcakes, and as everybody knows, pictures in news articles relate to it.
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Yes, making food more expensive and having less money saving offers would work, and it definitely wouldn't achieve nothing except hitting the poorest people.
Fucking Government
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Yes, making food more expensive and having less money saving offers would work, and it definitely wouldn't achieve nothing except hitting the poorest people.
I think increasing the price of junk food is a good thing but I think there should be a decrease in the price of fruit, veg, meat and grains to go with it.
Fucking GovernmentI've always been one of those people who think I'm stupid enough to smoke I should be stupid enough to pay extra tax for the pleasure of it.
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I've always been one of those people who think I'm stupid enough to smoke I should be stupid enough to pay extra tax for the pleasure of it.
I agree - and I can easily afford to smoke, and I can afford to take the increase in costs.Trying to reduce the amount of something someone consumes by simply making it more expensive is stupid though because it only impacts the poorest people. It only stops the consumption by the people who can no longer afford to buy it, and nobody else.
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It only stops the consumption by the people who can no longer afford to buy it, and nobody else.
I think there's evidence that it does reduce consumption. Most people aren't in the situation that they can afford everything they want, more that they can get luxury A if they cut back on luxury B
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I think there's evidence that it does reduce consumption.
Even for people who can still afford it post-price-hike?
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According to this, the effect is there but very small with cigarettes. I may be misremembering, although with topics like smoking there is a lot of highly motivated reasoning out there
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28 fucking pages?!
I assume the latter pages (which I might read later if I get bored) support the theory, as the first page doesn't.
As shown in Figure 1, tobacco taxes remained relatively constant in real terms between 1983 and 1990, but tobacco use declined continuously during this period. From 1990 to 1998, tobacco taxes increased by approximately 20%, but tobacco use continued to decline at about the same rate as between 1983 and 1990. Finally, from 1998 to 2008 tobacco taxes nearly doubled and there were over 100 increases in state tobacco taxes, yet tobacco use remained on its long run trend toward less use with no noticeable break as taxes began to increase significantly. More sophisticated empirical evidence, which we review below, also does not provide strong support for the hypothesis that increases in tobacco taxes reduce adult cigarette consumption.
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This looks like it'll go on a while.... Jeff'd
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Sorry :\
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No worries, I just don't want to have to figure out who's celebrating what in the middle of it :)
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Don't apologize to her! She's just power tripping, wanted to see her icon on the far left of a topic she didn't start.
MOD ABUSE!
please don't smite me
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28 fucking pages?!
Are you assuming I read it? I'm just going by the abstract, which claims you'd need a 100% tax to decrease smoking by 5%
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please don't smite me
I dunno, you seemed to have enjoyed it last time. You even asked for it!
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the effect is there but very small with cigarettes.
That's only because you don't have a border with Ukraine.
Here, every time they bump the cigarette tax, people just turn to the black market. And that's the better outcome.
The worse outcome is that since they can no longer afford a loaf of bread for kids and a pack of smokes, they'll just buy a pack of smokes.
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Mafia? That's... different....
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Here, every time they bump the cigarette tax, people just turn to the black market.
My state benefits from insane taxes in places like New York, where they literally kill people who don't pay the taxes.
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True, but food as a whole isn't a luxury. When Staple A and Luxury B fill the same need, and the price of Staple A increases, paradoxically people buy more of Staple A: They can no longer afford to get A and B, and they gotta keep their kids fed somehow, so all-A it is.
Want to fix that? Make B less of a luxury. Invert that relationship.
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Sugar tax and offers ban 'would work' - BBC News
No it wouldn't, and it's utter bollocks. The stuff they want to tax, is already taxed at the standard rate of 20% VAT.
This is just the usual bully-statism, wherein people who don't like others doing things poke their noses in others' business and espouse opinions that others should stop doing those things,
Self-determinism doesn't get a look-in with these people.
It's just like this cock-socket, who is one of those advocating the sugar tax:
Jamie Oliver slaps 10p sugar tax on all sweet drinks at his restaurants in protest at Government's refusal to introduce levy
Now if he really wanted to encourage people to stop eating sugary things in his restaurant, then perhaps a better way would be to simply stop selling them?
Of course not - a google search for [jamie oliver hypocrite] throws up no end of links...
Jamie Oliver’s guilty sugar secret: his own recipes are full of the stuff:
People who run vegan restaurants think that killing animals is evil, but they don’t settle for increasing the price of a steak by 10p. They stop serving it. Oliver’s approach is rather different. He hikes the price of a glass of Coke from £2.60 to £2.70 while selling cookery books which are, to put it gently, not wholly consistent with his trenchant anti-sugar views.
Jamie says we shouldn’t be eating more than seven teaspoons of sugar a day. Will he therefore be apologising for his ‘chocolate love cake’ recipe that contains 21 teaspoons of the stuff? What about his sticky toffee pudding (12 teaspoons) or his tasty sundae (16 teaspoons)? Will he be recalling and pulping the cookery book that gave the world his recipe for gluten-free Christmas cake in which every slice had 28 teaspoons? (Jamie has not yet updated his website to include the new sugar guidelines, but that is now four times the recommended daily amount.)‘We added carbohydrate values to menus last year to make it easier for diabetics to calculate insulin doses.
‘Most diabetics do not need this breaking down further into starch and sugar. We never purposefully withhold any information, including sugar content, from our customers.’
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My state benefits from insane taxes in places like New York, where they literally kill people who don't the taxes.
The descent into madness is beginning.
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Meanwhile in Finland we were forced by EU to remove our taxes on candy because it was unfair. Take one guess if the stores lowered the prices the corresponding amount.
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where they literally kill people who don't the taxes.
I think you accidentally a word.
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Urg...I think I was going between "over the taxes" and "who don't pay the taxes." Fixed now.
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Now if he really wanted to encourage people to stop eating sugary things in his restaurant, then perhaps a better way would be to simply stop selling them?
Yes. But that'd be actually doing something about it.
However the Government (and Jamie Oliver etc) don't want to actually do something about it because that could impact them, they just want to look like they're doing something while impacting people who aren't them.No-one who's already paying £2 fucking 60p for a glass of Coke is going to give two shits that it's now £2 fucking 70p.
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@loopback0 said:
That I would believe. Rain, storm, chest infection or gradual 2 euro price hike. Nothing stopped me.28 fucking pages?!
Are you assuming I read it? I'm just going by the abstract, which claims you'd need a 100% tax to decrease smoking by 5%
cock-socket
I'll have to remember that one.
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This is a good point, but things like vegetables are already cheap. The real problem is that poor people have to work/hustle to stay afloat, so they don't have time/energy to cook healthy food. They buy convenience food instead, which is always the most processed and least healthy.
Healthy convenience food pretty much does not exist at all.
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No-one who's already paying £2 fucking 60p for a glass of Coke is going to give two shits that it's now £2 fucking 70p.
Not according to the thick-tongued, sainted one(£):
October 19 2015:
Jamie Oliver’s unofficial sugar tax has successfully nudged customers in his restaurants away from choosing unhealthy drinks, he claimed yesterday.
The celebrity chef said: “Even on our own sugary drinks tax we have seen a shift away from sugary drinks of 6 per cent to 7 per cent. I think that is a metaphor for the whole country.”Yup - that's right a massive
6%. 7%somewhere around there of his customers have stopped buying sugary drinks. Apparently. That's massively outside the bounds of statistical error.
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The descent into madness is beginning.
Do you even have any idea what he means? He's telling the literal truth, except for a possible quibble about "people" vs. "a person".
You seem ineducable, though, so you probably will keep believing whatever it is you believe.
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Yup - that's right a massive 6%. 7%somewhere around there of his customers have stopped buying sugary drinks. Apparently. That's massively outside the bounds of statistical error.
Sounds like it's probably the shame factor, not the money.
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Do you even have any idea what he means?
You bring up a good point. I thought he was talking about New York, but he might have been talking about me. Because he does enjoy flaunting his ignorance.
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6 per cent to 7 per cent
If that's a relative change (the current number of people buying sugary drinks is 93-94% of what it was before), then that's probably statistically insignificant.
If it's absolute then it depends on how many were previously drinking sugary drinks. If that was 100% then absolute == relative. If it was 6-7% then he's eliminated sugary drinks from his restaurants (and would have mentioned that)
Other factors: he's all over the news with this shit, so the kind of people who like him will know he's all "uugh, sugar. Noooo", and be less likely to nuy it from his restaurants
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Other factors: he's all over the news with this shit, so the kind of people who like him will know he's all "uugh, sugar. Noooo", and be less likely to nuy it from his restaurants
People who like him are generally idiots and won't realise that most of the food in his restaurants contains sugar.
I'm wondering when he's going to go on a crusade regarding the evils of olive-oil (he currently, probably, gets through a 6-gallon drum in each of his cookery shows.)
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he currently, probably, gets through a 6-gallon drum in each of his cookery shows
Yeah, but half of that goes in his hair
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Yeah, but half of that goes in his hair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsTWFsEi0aE
Most recent comment at the time of writing:
@Faris said:
4 weeks ago
I bet he uses it as lube.
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I'm stupid enough to smoke I should be stupid enough to pay extra tax for the pleasure of it.
Why?
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Only extremely sane people would type "people who don't the taxes".
NOTE TO FROSTCAT: THE ABOVE STATEMENT IS SARCASM. ALSO YOU SMELL LIKE ASS.
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Only extremely sane people would type "people who don't the taxes".
Just preserving this so everyone sees your contradiction. Note well, everyone, @blakeyrat thinks "extremely sane" people are about to go insane.
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Extreme sanity is pretty mad
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olive oil (he currently, probably, gets through a 6-gallon drum in each of his cookery shows.)
It's good stuff, though. I pretty much always use more than what recipes call for.
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Just preserving this so everyone sees your contradiction.
It's even worse than we thought. It was an attempt at gramming!
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No, still too ambiguous. Apparently it's indistinguishable from gibberish.
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No, still too ambiguous. Apparently it's indistinguishable from gibberish.
Isn't it the attempt that counts?
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As a general rule, taxes shouldn't be used to alter behavior. It turns tax rule making into a political nightmare and creates perverse incentives, like a government depending on sugar consumption tax revenue to fund their school system. It also creates opportunities for the public to find a less efficient route to buy goods at lower cost by avoiding the tax - see cigarettes and Native Americans, mail order and sales tax, people who drive to Pennsylvania to buy clothes, etc.
Most of the time, allocating a chunk of money from the general pool and using it for awareness and education programs is a better use of funds. If it really is a cost thing, subsidize the good alternative rather than taxing the bad one.
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As a general rule, taxes shouldn't be used to alter behavior.
Unfortunately, there is a difference between "should" and "is politically tenable". There are the problems you point out, but if you really do want to go for the stated goal other options are often not available (though with the amount of handouts that euro countries do subsidizing good alternatives should be passable even if it wouldn't fly here in the states).
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subsidize the good alternative rather than taxing the bad one
The only problem with your proposal is that it doesn't bring any money to the government.
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The only problem with your proposal is that it doesn't bring any money to the government.
The money comes from the general fund. Raise taxes or eliminate a different benefit. All this "tax X is for service Y" crap is stupid.