It’s been hard to watch TV lately without seeing an ad from Americans Against Food Taxes urging us to let Washington know we’re opposed to levies on juice and pop.
As propaganda goes, these ads are exquisite. First there was the family setting up camp and heading off with fishing gear, with a voice urging us to preserve those simple pleasures we all enjoy.
(It should be noted that the gear for one of those simple pleasures — sport fishing — has been subject to a 10 percent federal excise tax since 1937. Few anglers complain about it, since the money goes to improve fish habitat.)
In the second ad, a suburban mom driving home from the store says we’re in hard times, and we see a foreclosed house and a store going out of business. Then she tells us that a few pennies may not mean much to those unheeding folks in Congress, but they can add up as she tries to feed her family.
But how much of a penny-pincher is she? She drives a relatively new car. A struggling taxpayer would walk, ride the bus, or nurse an old pickup. Her clothes fit her well and are not patched. Her handsome two-story home is not a tarpaper shack or the underside of a bridge.
So her family is not just eking out a living. Plus, we can see a two-liter soda bottle amid her purchases.
If she really were trying to make every penny count at the supermarket, wouldn’t she get her family all the nutrition she could for her grocery dollar? Powdered milk, peanut butter, day-old bread, that sort of stuff, instead of flavored fizzy sugar water that can rot her kids’ teeth?
Notice the shift here. In the Camping Family ad, soft drinks were one of life’s simple pleasures to be enjoyed by families, like bedtime stories and trips to the zoo.
With Shopping Mom, soft drinks have morphed into food, right up there with clothing and shelter as a necessity of life, and the message opposes taxation of “juice drinks and soda,” except they want you to hear it as “juice, drinks and soda.”
Juices are presumably wholesome natural products, squeezed from oranges and grapes. Obviously they count as real food, even if many nutritionists say that the actual grape or orange is better for you.
But “juice drinks” aren’t exactly juice. By the standards of the Food and Drug Administration, a juice drink is a “beverage that contains less than 100 percent and more than 0 percent fruit or vegetable juice.”
In other words, you can put a dash of real orange juice into a quart of water mixed with artificial flavors and corn syrup, then legally sell it as “orange juice drink.” And if you’re the lobbying group Americans Against Food Taxes, you call this concoction “food.”
So why aren’t they up in arms against other “food taxes?” A beverage once known as “liquid bread,” made from salubrious barley sprouts and farm-fresh hops, faces a federal beer tax of $18 a barrel, or 58 cents a gallon. Wine, which many people consider a vital component of a good meal, is taxed at federal rates that range from $1.07 to $3.30 a gallon.
Those food taxes — if “grape-flavored juice drink” is a food, then so is Mad Dog 2 0/20 — are also “sin taxes.” The idea is to use taxes to raise the price of a given pleasure which has social costs, thereby reducing demand while augmenting the public treasury.
So, no, I don’t have a problem with taxing juice drinks and soda. At best they’re junk food, not even close to a nutritional necessity, and there are a lot of people, physicians and dentists among them, who consider these beverages a menace to public health.
Further, it’s an easy tax to avoid. Just don’t buy the stuff.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a freelance writer and history buff, and a frequent contributor to The Post.
