Ever read Harrison Bergeron, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut? No? Well, I'll save you some time.
A push for new taxes on soda, beer and wine to help pay for Americans’ health care is stirring up more than just the beverage industry.
Advertisers, corn refiners—even addiction treatment centers—have mobilized their lobbyists, reflecting how a tax increase for a handful of popular products can reverberate broadly across Washington’s interest groups.
The Senate Finance Committee is considering raising taxes on alcohol and imposing a new levy on soda and other naturally sweetened drinks to help pay for overhauling health care. The committee calls them “lifestyle tax proposals,” saying the levies would slow sales of unhealthy products that contribute to rising medical costs.
Besides alcohol, drinks with sugar, high fructose corn syrup and similar sweeteners would be targeted, though diet drinks with artificial sweeteners would not. Other industries also are on alert, worried that the idea of “lifestyle taxes” could spread to other products deemed unhealthy.
“Are they going to hit couch manufacturers? School districts that have canceled physical education?” joked Neil Trautwein, health care lobbyist for the National Retail Federation, which opposes the plan and whose members include fast-food restaurants.
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6 comments:
They should tax soda $2 a can.
Alcohol and cigs are taxed to death as it is.
There should be a $5 surcharge at every fast food restaurant per visit. And a $25 tax on a box of Macaroni and Cheese and every drumstick of fried chicken.
Fucking ridiculous.
Fucking ridiculous.
Sorry about the double post.
Double posts will be taxed...pay up!
He did use a certain amount of bandwidth and electricty in posting three times to explain one post, not to mention wasting three seconds of some 100,000 big feed readers production time.
So I say, Yeah, tax that sumbitch.
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