The taxman cometh for soft drinks. Or so it appears these days. We already know they’re on the table as a possible funding source for Obama’s health care reform. And behind the scenes, the co-author of an influential paper on the potential positive effect of soda taxes, New York City’s Health Commissioner Tom Frieden, has just been named to run the Centers for Disease Control. And today David Leonhardt, one of the NYT’s top economics writers published a column praising the benefits of taxing soda in particular and calories in general. I even learned that taxes on activities or objects we want less of have a cosmically appropriate name, at least in terms of calories. They are technically known as Pigovian taxes and are named not after our barnyard friends, but after Arthur Cecil Pigou, an English economist. But I digress.
As interested as I was in Leonhardt’s arguments in favor of a soda tax, I was even more interested in the nifty chart that appeared with the article. It traces the drop in soda prices which began, suspiciously, in the early 80s just as High Fructose Corn Syrup was taking off. But it also traces the rise in the price of fruits and vegetables over the same period. The chart is a bit confusing as it’s actually measuring the price rise relative to the Consumer Price Index. So, as the chart explains, fruit and veg prices have risen 40% faster than the CPI over the last 30 years.
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