By Karen DeWitt
Albany, NY – Health commissioner, Dr. Richard Daines is once again Governor Paterson's top lieutenant in the fight to win acceptance of a tax on sugared soft drinks.
His Youtube video, with props like bags of sugar and a giant fat globule, demonstrating the harmful consequences of drinking too much soda-pop has had nearly 75,000 hits since it was released last year.
This year, the tax proposal is structured in a slightly different way. Daines explains that it is an excise tax on the bottlers of one penny per ounce. Consumers would see the price difference at the point of purchase instead of at the end of the cash register, and the hope is that they're buying behavior would be influenced.
"A twelve ounce can of soda, if your paying maybe 60 cents your going to be paying 72 cents for it, and you would see that price difference right at the sales display. That's the idea that kind of guides you subliminally to say, well let me pull the one that is still 60 cents rather than 72 cents," said Daines.
The health commissioner estimates that price difference could result in the consumption of one less sugared soft drink a week for someone who buys one everyday. The tax would be dedicated to health programs.
Another change from last year, says Daines, is even more data showing the correlation between heavy consumption of sweetened soft drinks and childhood obesity. He points to the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, which studied the long-term health effects of obesity on children as they grow into adulthood and links to premature death, as early as around the age of 30.
"We're not talking about chubby kids getting teased. We're talking about lower survival rates and not at 60, we're saying this curve starts to drop off, it looks to me, at about 29 or 30 years of age," said Daines.
In 2009 Governor Paterson first pushed for a soda tax, touting it in his budget proposal in the State of the State address. But he later abruptly dropped the idea, saying the legislature did not want to go along with it. Daines says, sometimes it takes more than one year to convince people, including state lawmakers, of a new idea.
The beverage industry is once again pushing back, saying the tax will reduce consumption of soda pop and predicting that jobs will be lost. Commissioner Daines was grilled on the subject at a legislative budget hearing. Senator John DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican, said he was offended by, what many critics call, a nanny state proposal. DeFrancisco asked why normal weight people should be punished with a new tax for a problem, that he says, really stems from people's own choices and behaviors.
"Without even getting into the issue of jobs and companies losing business, you're actually requiring people who make right choices in life; maybe they may not be obese because they work out, or they might not be obese because they drink in moderation. You want them to pay the same tax in order to fight the obesity of those who make other choices," said DeFrancisco.
Daines answered that those who drink more soda, pay more of the tax. He told the senator that sugared soft drinks are already artificially priced lower than their market value because they rely on corn syrup as a sweetener, and corn farmers are heavily subsidized by the government.
"If sodas were not mispriced and we weren't introducing moral hazard into this, you could let the market work. But the market is failing on sodas," said Daines.
DeFrancisco quickly asked, "And where did you get your doctorate in economics?"
Daines takes the opposition in stride, noting that people said the same things about limits on smoking when the ideas were first proposed. Few lawmakers have spoken out in favor of the tax, but there is a multibillion dollar budget deficit. Commissioner Daines and Governor Paterson are counting on the over $450 million on estimated revenue that the tax would bring in to health care programs to help change their minds.