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

[bart_calendar]

The thing is people freaking out about Congress maybe picking the next president really don't get it. It's not some weird end run around our country's values.

That clause in the Constitution was put in for exactly this situation.

The founders were terrified that someone like Trump would get the popular vote someday so they set up the system so that if that happened the Electoral College could say "fuck this guy" and then kick it up to the House thinking they would pick a different, more sane person.

Which is exactly what would happen. Sure I'm not a Romney fan, but he is a sane person and not a tyrant and a member of the party that has the most elected representatives.

That seems relatively fair - and I'm sort of happy we have a system in place that can knock out obvious lunatics during periods of time - which happen to every country from time to time - when freaked out voters try to elect someone demonstrably awful.

[a_pawson]

So let me see if I understand this correctly.

You need 270 electoral college votes to become President. So Hilary could get 269, Trump 200 and A.N. Other 69 votes. But rather than declaring Hilary the winner, instead Congress gets to decide? It may be in the constitution, but I can forsee riots if that happens.

[andrewducker]

The current British PM only has 36.9% of the vote...

[a_pawson]

Yes and as the leader of the party that got the most votes, it is to be expected that he become Prime Minister (subject to the vagaries of our electoral system). The US equivalent seems to be that Mr Cameron didn't get 50% of the votes, we forget the whole contest, and the House of Lords gets to choose someone instead.

[a_pawson]

They really ought to stop calling it the sugar tax. The list of things that are not going to be subject to tax starts with 1) sugar!

The irn-bru* tax would be more appropriate.

* other soft drinks are available

[gonzo21]

Or the 'Tax On Drinks That Poor People Like'.

[cybik]

It is yet another 'fuck the poor' tax, basically.

[gonzo21]

Aye, if it was on sugar across the board, then fair enough. But this half-assed implementation smacks of classism.

I'm also not entirely convinced about the idea of them starting to tax everything else that is unhealthy too.

Sin taxes

[drdoug]

Rare slip from Tim Harford:

"First, similar harms should attract similar taxes. The UK duty on 10ml of pure alcohol, roughly the amount in a shot of vodka or half a pint of beer, varies wildly. It is about 7p in strong cider, 18p in strong beer, or 28p in whisky and wine. A consistent price per millilitre would make more sense."

He is quite right that this would make sense. It is a great idea. It is also practically impossible for the Chancellor to do alone. Alcohol duty is subject to EU agreements (for good reasons) and currebtly those effectively forbid applying it in per-ml terms.

RE: Sin taxes

[brixtonbrood]

Which is why we're trying for a minimum unit pricing - which is still falling foul of EU rules.

[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.”

[danieldwilliam]

I'm in general in favour of Turkey joining the EU

[skington]

Also, if we say "hey Turkey, it's cool, you can join despite having not much in the way of rule of law or internal democracy", that just emboldens Hungary.

Oh, and gives Marine Le Pen a few boatloads of additional votes.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes, that also.

[andrewducker]

I agree. I think that the potential for them to join should be there, but it should be based on their actual suitability to do so, and not on momentary gain.