Seattle strikes down its fee on arcade games, pinball, pool, and more fun ( www.kuow.org )

JohnnyH842 , 10 months ago

Cool! I mean with the amount of money it was generating it seems like a no brainer to offer even a little assistance for businesses. I wasn’t aware of the soda tax!

SeaJ OP , 10 months ago

It was a pretty big deal. Most grocery stores bitched about it and protested by giving an explanation of why sugary soda cost more. The beverage companies then got together and made sure a soda tax could not happen in the rest of the state. They framed it as making sure that grandma could afford her groceries. She can afford her soda now but probably not her necessary diabetes medication.

JohnnyH842 , 10 months ago

I’d love to know how affective those preventative taxes are for reducing consumption. Same thing happened with tobacco products across the country and now people are still using tobacco at high rates but just complaining about the cost.

Lumun , 10 months ago

I don’t know if there’s good data on the sugary drinks tax yet, but tobacco taxes have absolutely greatly reduced tobacco use. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228562/From the intro of that article:

Tobacco taxation, passed on to consumers in the form of higher cigarette prices, has been recognized as one of the most effective population-based strategies for decreasing smoking and its adverse health consequences

JohnnyH842 , 10 months ago

Thanks for linking this! That’s cool to see that it’s an effective deterrent, but also looks like it might not change the behavior of long term users.

However, there is a striking lack of evidence about the impact of increasing cigarette prices on smoking behavior in heavy/long-term smokers, persons with a dual diagnosis and Aboriginals