Interesting Links for 18-03-2016

[andrewducker]

Sugar tax: What is the UK's most sugary drink? (tags: sugar drinking uk tax ) Reality Check: How soon can Turkey join the EU? (tags: turkey eu ) Why Osborne’s sugar tax is half baked (tags: sugar tax uk viaPatrickHadfield ) What's going on with the UK and sin taxes? (tags: tax uk viaPatrickHadfield ) I have never wanted to be Taylor Swift more

Comments

[gonzo21]

The Sin taxes thing annoys me most because okay ,make unhealthy things more expensive to discourage their overuse. Fine. But why not subsidise healthy things?

I find it utterly absurd that a pack of 3-5 Pink Lady apples costs ~£2.50.

If there is a sugar tax, then there should also be a fruit-and-veg subsidy. Because a lot of fresh fruit in particularly has become mind-bogglingly expensive. (And is frequently shit.)

[skington]

I suspect it might be rather difficult to give out subsidies at a level that would make a difference, and prevent people gaming the system. Let's suppose there's, say, a £1.50 subsidy for that pack of Pink Lady apples so they now cost £1 in the shops. Anyone who can get them for less than £1.50 now has a perfect reason to buy as many as they can. At a rough guess the supermarkets probably pay between £1 and £2, and the farmer probably gets 30-50p, so if you can set yourself up as a distribution company you've got a licence to print money.

Obviously the government can look out for such wheezes, but that requires an extra layer of verification and bureaucracy, so suddenly the government isn't spending £1.50 on cheap fruit for people, it's probably spending more like £1.75, £2 or more.

And more prosaically, it's probably against EU rules (specifically the CAP), probably something along the lines of illegal state subsidies.

[gonzo21]

What about coming at it from the direction of the state providing vouchers to people to use to spend on fruit and veg?

Like okay, here's a sugar tax, and in return, every person will get £10 a month to spend on fruit?

[skington]

You still have the government overhead of this special money that can be used only for fruit and veg, and now you've created a business model for buying up the unused vouchers every month and turning them into real money. (Possibly via fruit-related charities, or businesses that are deliberately running a loss for tax reasons.)

Per Terry Pratchett:
Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats-and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”

[gonzo21]

Heh. :)

Well, I do think people would eat more fruit and veg if it were cheaper. Aldi and Lidl have had good success with their six-a-week offers on fruit and veg where they discount some basic things.

[drdoug]

As so often, Pratchett was smart and drawing on real-life examples - it seems something like the rat business actually happened in French-Colonial Hanoi (but not with cobras in the Raj): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect