Street Talk: The Soda Debate — Simple Pleasure or Guilty One?
Roll Call Staff
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Here’s a great case study for an introductory class in public policy advocacy.
Your client makes a product that has about 150 calories and negligible nutritional value. It tastes great but is contributing to the country’s obesity epidemic. It is relatively cheap and especially popular among poorer citizens, who are disproportionately obese.
Meanwhile Congress, sensing a potential revenue raiser, wants to slap a federal excise tax of 3 cents per 12 ounces on every drink sweetened with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.
That would cut back on soft drink consumption by an estimated 3 percent, throwing people out of work and shrinking overall tax revenues. Net that out, however, and you’re still going to raise an estimated $24 billion over the next five years, says the Congressional Budget Office. That’s not chump change.
So far, however, a federal soda tax has been a nonstarter. Whether the industry’s $2 million ad campaign had much to do with that is difficult to gauge; there are plenty of factors conspiring to stop Congress from taxing sodas that are bigger than a print or television ad.
Still, after a May Senate Finance Committee roundtable broached the idea of increasing the tax on beer and adding a tax on soda, the American Beverage Association leapt into action.
A mid-size trade group with a $10 million budget, the ABA represents 90 percent of the nonalcoholic beverage market — which includes 220,000 employees and sales of some $110 billion a year.
On July 12, with money it had assessed from its members, it began an inside- the-Beltway TV and print campaign — nobeverageandfoodtaxes.com — that’s still going on.
The print ad duplicates the final scene in the 30-second television spot, and it was produced by Goddard Claussen of “Harry and Louise” fame.
But on first glance, it resembles a “Saturday Night Live” parody — a 40- or 50- somethingish couple in a romantic moment seated in front of a campfire, each holding a can of soda. To drive home the point, a two-liter bottle marked “Soda” in large white letters is visible next to an orange cooler; there is a peaceful body of water behind the couple, and a tent, with a dim light inside, is off to the right.
The romantic implications of a soft drink before bed? It’s an interesting notion, to say the least, especially with a print ad that reminds many people of a spot for Eddie Bauer or Cialis.
“We didn’t want a hard-hitting ad,” ABA Senior Vice President for Public Affairs Kevin Keane says with some understatement. “We’re not looking to undermine health care, so our tone and approach was important.”
There are many credible reasons not to add a federal tax to sugar-sweetened sodas. There’s a fairness argument: Why tax one nutritionally deficient product and not another? A censorship argument: Do we really need food police to tax us into certain nutritional choices? A statistical argument: While the obesity rate has jumped 37 percent since 1998, soft drink sales have declined 9 percent.
And there’s the regressive tax argument — that poor people will spend disproportionately more of their income on a 3-cents-a-can soda tax than those earning comfortable salaries.
The beverage makers eschewed those arguments and took another tack, one that ties soda drinking to life’s “simple pleasures” — lying on the sofa and watching TV, driving down the parkway in a convertible, skipping rocks in the creek.
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