Equa-burden

If we are going to start drafting up clever new taxes, we'd first better make sure they're fair.

by Isaiah Thompson

"This is a tax that has two purposes. No. 1 is revenue generation for the city," was the first thing city Health Commissioner Donald Schwarz told me about the mayor's proposed "soda tax." No. 2, as you've no doubt heard, was the "opportunity to make a difference in obesity." And that just about says it. The proposal, which would tax retailers 2 cents for every ounce of "sugar-sweetened beverage" that they sell — soda, Gatorade, frappa-mocha-chinos, and (I checked) tonic water, among others — may be multipurpose, but it's not equa-purpose. Nor is it equa-burdensome.

It won't, for example, make much of a difference to me. I drink coffee: black, thanks.

And I'm not alone in not drinking soda. There are lots of people who look an awful lot like my educated, middle-income self that don't, either, according to one 2008 study conducted in New York, which found that soda drinkers were more likely to be lower income, less educated and non-white. Those statistics suggest that I and my demographic kin will pay less of this tax than less well-off, less educated or less white Philadelphians. It's a little awkward, frankly. It seems to me that if we are going to start drafting up clever new taxes, we'd first better make sure they're fair. I'm not sure this one is. But, then again, I'm not entirely sure it isn't. Big Sugar's like Big Oil, in a lot of ways: We subsidize its production, subsidize its low costs and then guzzle it like there's no tomorrow, to our own (expensive) detriment. We're already paying more for sugar — to doctors.

So does this tax change that equation? Schwarz will testify before City Council that increasing the price of sugary drinks will help deter people from drinking so many of them, and will raise money that can be used (in part, mind you) to combat Philadelphia's obesity epidemic. He thinks that will happen, but he also concedes a point being made by critics: Retailers could distribute the extra cost among all their merchandise and sell soda at only slightly more than before. So far, the only counter-stratagem Schwarz has mentioned is to "encourage" companies not to.

What if they do, anyway? What if the tax turns out not to deter the sugar-thirsty from their drinks? If it doesn't curb obesity, after all? What if it turns out to be a tax the sugar-drinkers pay, but don't get anything from? Wouldn't we lose a little moral zing here?

"Remember," Schwarz says, "first is revenue."