Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s poltical analyst.
Here are two “facts:”
1. Sugared beverages are a major – arguably the single greatest – cause of obesity and diabetes.
2. Whenever an American drives – or, for that matter, just rides in – an automobile, the trip is government-subsidized.
The quotation marks around the word acknowledge that these might not be “facts” in the way that, say, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius (212F) at sea level is a fact.
But the evidence – the empirically tested evidence gathered and evaluated by scholars with no financial conflicts of interest – is so overwhelming in both cases that no other conclusion makes sense.
But these are facts Vermonters will rarely if ever see, read, or hear in the news coverage of the legislative debates over imposing an excise tax on sugared sodas or raising the gasoline tax.
The aim here is neither to endorse these proposals nor to criticize the reporters writing the stories. There are legitimate arguments against both measures, and the reporters deserve more sympathy than scorn. They are confined by the rules of their game, which include both keeping the stories as short as possible and not taking sides.
Good rules, too. A reporter should be a disinterested observer, following the motto of the late great Chicago Tribune baseball writer Jerome Holtzman: “No cheering in the press box.” And putting that data into a story risks clogging it with … well, data, which then have to be explained, which can get lengthy and boring. Though some readers might find this hard to believe, reporters don’t like boring stories. Neither do their editors.
So the standard news account is limited to quoting Side A saying this proposal will cure the common cold and unrequited love, and Side B insisting that it would destroy the economy of the state if not the nation. The quotes are usually accurate. But that’s not journalism; it’s stenography.
Again, don’t blame the reporters. After noting that the House Committee on Confabulations and Confusion has passed or rejected a bill, and quoting one lawmaker and one lobbyist on each side of the issue, reporters wouldn’t have the space to put anything else into their stories even if they had the time.
And they do not. There are not enough of them, so after covering that House committee meeting they have to run over to the Senate Committee on Discombobulation and Distortion.
Still, somewhere, sometime, the truth – the verifiable facts – underlying these debates ought to be explored, or at least mentioned.
Start with the gas tax. If the House version of the increase becomes law, gasoline will cost about seven cents a gallon more. By honest accounting, there is only one way to appraise that higher tax: it’s too low.
Specifically, it is too low to pay the full cost to the public imposed by the miles driven by that gallon of gas. This is simple arithmetic. Add up all the costs of building, maintaining, patrolling, and administering the highway system. Then add in even a small estimate of the health care costs caused by auto-created air pollution.
The sum is far greater than all the fuel excise taxes, registration fees and traffic ticket fines paid by motorists. Taxpayers foot the bill for the rest. Nationally, a responsible assessment of a decade ago put the difference at more than $100 billion. And that assessment did not include the billions the U.S. government spends each year making sure the oil tanker shipping lanes from the Middle East remain open.
Yet many Vermont motorists obviously think their gas taxes are subsidizing the rest of state government. It is not. Years ago, as much as $43 million a year in gas tax revenue was allocated to the General Fund “for transportation-related expenditures (of) various agencies,” said Sue Minter, deputy secretary of the Agency of Transportation.
Anyone who knows anything about legislatures might reasonably suspect that Vermont’s diverted a bit more than a strict accounting of “transportation-related expenditures” would warrant. But Minter said that amount has been coming down since 2006, and now only about $25 million, all for the Department of Public Safety. That’s the Vermont State Police, which spends $25 million patrolling the highways.
Some gas tax money also goes to the Education Fund. Schools do a lot of transporting. Besides, schools subsidize automobile use, too. Tammy Pregent of the Agency of Transportation (via email) said, “every public high school must offer Driver’s Education to all students free of charge to those students who are at least 15 years old and possess a valid learners permit.”
In many countries in Europe, where, as Minter noted, motorists “pay double what we pay” for fuel, the driving tests are more arduous and a license-preparation course can cost several hundred dollars. Europeans (and Canadians, too) come closer to paying the real cost of driving than Americans, including Vermonters, who insist that the state and federal governments subsidize them.
The soda tax facts are not mere arithmetic. They are sound science, though one might not know it from those who keep insisting that doughnuts and ice cream make people fat, too.
They do. They are also real food. Rare is the person who has another doughnut soon after having one. That’s not true of soda. If the evidence pinpointing sugared sodas as a leading cause of obesity is not conclusive, it is perilously close.
And the evidence that it is a leading cause of diabetes, which costs the health care system billions of dollars a year, is even stronger. In fact, according to a new study in the prestigious scientific journal PLOS One, sugared drinks seem to be a greater cause of diabetes than is obesity itself.
“We found that every 150 kcal/person/day increase in sugar availability (about one can of soda/day) was associated with increased diabetes prevalence by 1.1% … after testing for potential selection biases and controlling for other food types … total calories, overweight and obesity,” the study found. “No other food types yielded significant individual associations with diabetes prevalence after controlling for obesity and other confounders. The impact of sugar on diabetes was independent of sedentary behavior and alcohol use, and the effect was modified but not confounded by obesity or overweight.”
In other words, even people who are generally obese are less likely to become diabetic if they don’t drink sugared sodas.
But in Vermont, the conversation is polluted by both junk science and junk history.
“Philosophically,” said Gov. Peter Shumlin at one of his recent news conference, “I don’t believe that you change human behavior when it comes to what we eat, what we consume, through tax policy. I just don’t believe that works.”
Vermont seems to have a governor who has never heard of tobacco. Smoking cigarettes used to be cool. Richard Blaine, proprietor of Rick’s Café in wartime Casablanca, than whom no one was ever cooler, smoked cigarettes. These days, puffing on one is grounds for social disgrace in much of the country. One can reasonably opine that this shift in public attitude is excessive. One cannot reasonably deny that it is real, and that higher tobacco taxes are one reason why.
None of this proves that either or both tax increases are the best policy. The gas tax is and the sugared beverage tax would be regressive. A poll commissioned by the pro-beverage tax American Heart Association Vermont found that as many as 35 percent of Vermonters who live near the New Hampshire border might cross that border to buy their sodas if the tax were imposed.
Most likely, many fewer would actually do so, but that’s small comfort to owners of convenience stores near the Connecticut River. There may also be doubts about how effective the beverage tax would be, and a justifiable argument over how aggressive government should be in trying to change eating and drinking habits.
All that should be part of the debate. But so should the facts.
