I need a mathematician

[MaggieMae]

Pulling a few statistics off the Internet, Americans drink 15 billion gallons of soda and 15.7 million gallons of beer every year.

Broken down into 12-ounce cans (recyclable!), how much could be accumulated if a mere $.05 were taxed on each can? (My calculator won't go that high.)

Could some sort of equitable health care reform be paid for with such a tax?

 

[KittenKoder]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

 

[midcan5]

Four billion dollars for the just the soda, so double it.

64 x 15b / 12 x .05 =

LOL - correction 128 in gallon so double = 8 billion

I miss the milk man and several brain cells.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Maggie's not proposing it, Congress is.

Maggie -- every "sin tax" ever conceived fails to bring in the projected revenue, because of the change of behavior desired. This is why they always fail. Taxes used as behavior modification, social engineering, punishing success, or for any other reason besides RAISING REVENUE fail every time they are tried.

Example: Cigarette taxes designed to get people to quit -- if they do, you DON'T get the fucking revenue projected, therefore all the money you thought you were gonna get, does not appear. Problem is, you already earmarked it in the same bill, to be spent on this or that. THIS is how you get such huge deficits!

Taxes aren't a social engineering or behavior modification or a punishment of success tool, they are for raising revenue.

 

[MaggieMae]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

 

[MaggieMae]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Maggie's not proposing it, Congress is.

Maggie -- every "sin tax" ever conceived fails to bring in the projected revenue, because of the change of behavior desired. This is why they always fail. Taxes used as behavior modification, social engineering, punishing success, or for any other reason besides RAISING REVENUE fail every time they are tried.

Example: Cigarette taxes designed to get people to quit -- if they do, you DON'T get the fucking revenue projected, therefore all the money you thought you were gonna get, does not appear. Problem is, you already earmarked it in the same bill, to be spent on this or that. THIS is how you get such huge deficits!

Taxes aren't a social engineering or behavior modification or a punishment of success tool, they are for raising revenue.

Yeah, I thought about all of that. However, the main sticking point seems to be mobility to handle the cost projections at the front end, not down the line. If cost containment in Medicare/Medicaid really do happen within 10 years, the "sin" tax wouldn't be needed.

I don't know. Just throwing stuff out there for conversation purposes.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Social control thru taxes....

That's a "winner" Hitler had!

 

[MaggieMae]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Social control thru taxes....

That's a "winner" Hitler had!

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You don't think something needs to be done to curb the fat pandemic? It ultimately will be YOU who pays for their diabetes, heart disease treatment, bypass surgeries, etc., etc., whether there is government health care or not.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Social control thru taxes....

That's a "winner" Hitler had!

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You don't think something needs to be done to curb the fat pandemic? It ultimately will be YOU who pays for their diabetes, heart disease treatment, bypass surgeries, etc., etc., whether there is government health care or not.

Are you a believer in evolution? Then look up Darwin's law of natural selection and get back to me.

Let it WORK!

 

[KittenKoder]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Okay, aside from what Midnight pointed out, you are so full of myths it's sad ... the scary part is that too many people still believe these same myths.

Obesity as defined by the government is not the unhealthy people, it's just people who don't fit in the outdated and already proven inaccurate BMI. Meaning, even the healthiest athletes are considered obese.

That's one myth. Their healthcare does not cost more than anyone else. Heart attacks are more common among "skinny" people who live with a lot of stress than people who are "obese", statistics on this keep changing based on the products they are endorsing, that should be your clue there.

Lastly, "sin" taxes just don't work.

 

[KittenKoder]

Social control thru taxes....

That's a "winner" Hitler had!

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You don't think something needs to be done to curb the fat pandemic? It ultimately will be YOU who pays for their diabetes, heart disease treatment, bypass surgeries, etc., etc., whether there is government health care or not.

Are you a believer in evolution? Then look up Darwin's law of natural selection and get back to me.

Let it WORK!

There's a crazy thing, heavy people exist because their genes have proven to be tougher.

 

[midcan5]

This is a sensible idea as soda, beer, even purchased water - which still strikes me as an absurd example of corporate need creation through ads - could produce good returns and have little effect on consumers.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

This is a sensible idea as soda, beer, even purchased water - which still strikes me as an absurd example of corporate need creation through ads - could produce good returns and have little effect on consumers.

Yep, tax the kid's soda pop. That's gonna fly real well with middle America and the poor isn't it? Especially since Obama promised 95% of Americans would get a tax CUT.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You don't think something needs to be done to curb the fat pandemic? It ultimately will be YOU who pays for their diabetes, heart disease treatment, bypass surgeries, etc., etc., whether there is government health care or not.

Are you a believer in evolution? Then look up Darwin's law of natural selection and get back to me.

Let it WORK!

There's a crazy thing, heavy people exist because their genes have proven to be tougher.

That might be what the FEAR of them is!

 

[toomuchtime_]

Pulling a few statistics off the Internet, Americans drink 15 billion gallons of soda and 15.7 million gallons of beer every year.

Broken down into 12-ounce cans (recyclable!), how much could be accumulated if a mere $.05 were taxed on each can? (My calculator won't go that high.)

Could some sort of equitable health care reform be paid for with such a tax?

Such a sales tax would be regressive, falling more heavily on low income people than on those with higher incomes, so how could any system that depended on such a tax be called equitable?

The way to rein in health care costs and to finance greater access to services is to reduce the need for services. A recent study showed that obesity in the US costs us about $147 billion a year in health care services. How about if, instead of taxing sugary drinks, the government requires health warnings on all high sugar, high fat foods, similar to those on tobacco products? How about an aggressive federally funded public education program about the dangers of obesity that promotes doable programs for weight control and exercise along with tax incentives for weight loss and for lowering blood pressure and blood sugar through life style changes? If such programs reduced the incidence of obesity in the US by 20%, it would produce a savings of nearly $300 billion over ten years as well as saving the lives of many Americans.

A more aggressive federal program to promote the conversion to electronic records would save many billions more as well as save American lives and prevent much suffering by reducing the overhead associated with managing paper records and film, eliminating the cost of medical mistakes due to incomplete or inaccurate medical histories, eliminating redundant testing, instantly providing comparative effectiveness data for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures relevant to your care to your doctor so that he will know if an older, less expensive procedure will be just as effective for you as a newer, more expensive one.

If instead of changing our system in the most expensive way possible, we apply these savings by building on what we already have by expanding government funded and privately funded free clinics and sliding scale clinics that exist everywhere and providing sliding scale subsidies for catastrophic care insurance, we can achieve universal coverage and rein in health care costs at the same time without raising taxes or acquiring new debt.

 

[Midnight Marauder]

Pulling a few statistics off the Internet, Americans drink 15 billion gallons of soda and 15.7 million gallons of beer every year.

Broken down into 12-ounce cans (recyclable!), how much could be accumulated if a mere $.05 were taxed on each can? (My calculator won't go that high.)

Could some sort of equitable health care reform be paid for with such a tax?

Such a sales tax would be regressive, falling more heavily on low income people than on those with higher incomes, so how could any system that depended on such a tax be called equitable?

The way to rein in health care costs and to finance greater access to services is to reduce the need for services. A recent study showed that obesity in the US costs us about $147 billion a year in health care services. How about if, instead of taxing sugary drinks, the government requires health warnings on all high sugar, high fat foods, similar to those on tobacco products? How about an aggressive federally funded public education program about the dangers of obesity that promotes doable programs for weight control and exercise along with tax incentives for weight loss and for lowering blood pressure and blood sugar through life style changes? If such programs reduced the incidence of obesity in the US by 20%, it would produce a savings of nearly $300 billion over ten years as well as saving the lives of many Americans.

A more aggressive federal program to promote the conversion to electronic records would save many billions more as well as save American lives and prevent much suffering by reducing the overhead associated with managing paper records and film, eliminating the cost of medical mistakes due to incomplete or inaccurate medical histories, eliminating redundant testing, instantly providing comparative effectiveness data for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures relevant to your care to your doctor so that he will know if an older, less expensive procedure will be just as effective for you as a newer, more expensive one.

If instead of changing our system in the most expensive way possible, we apply these savings by building on what we already have by expanding government funded and privately funded free clinics and sliding scale clinics that exist everywhere and providing sliding scale subsidies for catastrophic care insurance, we can achieve universal coverage and rein in health care costs at the same time without raising taxes or acquiring new debt.

Repair the leaky roof, the sagging steps, the plumbing, the electrical..... Change out the baby's bath water..... Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and tearing down the house and replacing it with a TRILLION dollar one, that might STILL have a leaky roof, sagging stairs, bad plumbing, bad electrical and have a bathtub with baby in it full of babyshit-infested water!

Don't these people even have a clue of common sense?

No, because their goal isn't to FIX this, it's to make it a CONTROL system.

 

[Oddball]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You don't think something needs to be done to curb the fat pandemic? It ultimately will be YOU who pays for their diabetes, heart disease treatment, bypass surgeries, etc., etc., whether there is government health care or not.

I'm so sick of this goddamn vapid red herring talking point I could puke!!

How in hell is it I pay for someone else's shitty lifestyle, any more than I pay higher auto insurance rates for bad drivers when I'm not one??

 

[KittenKoder]

Just like the smoking tax it will fail, because people will simply stop buying the product and eventually they'll need to look for the money from somewhere else ... which they will declare a different "crisis" to do so. It's stupid all around and for so many reasons.

 

[alan1]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Except while you are indicating that the obese and smokers are a drain to the health care system, science has proven otherwise.
Obese people, smokers cost the health system less than healthy do, study finds
Now that you are armed with that information, are you prepared to suggest that healthy foods get taxed at a higher rate? How about imposing a "health tax" on people that join fitness clubs or the Y?

 

[KittenKoder]

Proposing another "sin" tax again ... what's next, taxing beef?

Look up the obesity rate, dear. As a health problem, it now surpasses cigarette smoking. Yes, I'm ALL FOR taxing shit that causes people to unnecessarily need costly health care. It's a no-brainer.

Except while you are indicating that the obese and smokers are a drain to the health care system, science has proven otherwise.
Obese people, smokers cost the health system less than healthy do, study finds
Now that you are armed with that information, are you prepared to suggest that healthy foods get taxed at a higher rate? How about imposing a "health tax" on people that join fitness clubs or the Y?

I am all for that. That's a billion dollar a year industry that gets very light taxes and a ton of cuts just because people "feel good" about it, yet as studies have shown, they do little to improve health.