Should Sugary Drinks be Taxed

Sugary drinks should be taxed. Taxes are important for the you and the government because they fund public works, projects, and structures that you use every day. And sugary drinks aren't good for you anyway.Infrastructure, such as parks, libraries, bridges, roads, is so important for our daily life and economy, but unfortunately it is often taken for granted. Taxes fund these things. Taxes go to pay everything from national defense, health care, education, and law enforcement to food and nutritional programs, veteran housing and income, environmental conservation, and income for federal employees. Still, it's more than a little frustrating when April comes along and you've forgotten to fill out your 1040.Income tax is not the only way the government gets it's spending money, though. The main tax types are income tax, payroll tax, property tax, consumption tax, and tariffs, and most taxes you'll encounter fall into one of these categories. If there is a tax on sugary drinks, it would fit into the 'consumption tax' category. In 2015, $1.48 trillion, about 47% of all tax revenues, was produced by income tax paid by individuals. But a study in 2017 found that roughly 44.3% of American households didn't pay income tax in 2016. Daniel B. Klein, an American professor of economics at George Mason University, supposed that this is because "taxes may be the only thing most people pay without actually knowing how the money is spent." Let's look at the statistics.A study in February of 2014 by GOBankingRates shows that only 21% of participants agreed when given the prompt "I know how my income tax dollars are used, and 49.5% of participants disagreed.But there's no getting around consumer tax.According to CaffineInformer.com, Mountain Dew, the fourth most popular soda brand in the world, contains 3.83 grams of sugar per fluid ounce. In a standard 12 fluid ounce soda can that's 46 grams of sugar! Coca-Cola, the most popular brand of soda in the world by far, contains 3.83 grams of sugar per fluid ounce, or 39 grams of sugar in a standard 12 fluid ounce can. Its owner, the Coca-Cola Company, owns four of the world's top five sparkling non-alcoholic beverages brands -- Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta, and Sprite. The Coca-Cola Company alone reported revenue of over $40 billion. I think that companies like these can survive a small excise tax on their goods if they really wanted to.Rebuttals1. My opponent argues against taxing sugary drinks to the American people. He may be right about not taxing the American people, we'll see at the end of this debate. However, one tax that there is no valid counter-argument for is an excise tax enacted on the producers of these sugary beverages. The companies that produce SSB's (Sugar-Sweetened Beverages) can more than afford this tax.2. Another argument-- well, not even an argument, more of a statement-- posed by my opponent was that "there are still those soda drinkers that can"t get enough of those sweet and sugary drinks." This is true enough, but Con didn't take this argument and do anything with it; I will."Those soda drinkers that can't get enough of those sweet and sugary beverages" most likely are more than average soda drinkers, and most likely drink more than "about three glasses of soda" every day. Therefore, based on the most popular soda in the world, these 'drinkers' will be taking in a minimum of 117 grams of sugar before breakfast, lunch, dinner, or desert. WHO and SACN recommend only 30 grams of sugar per day for adults, based on sugar consumption being five percent of our entire energy intake. Currently, 13% of the global adult population is classified as obese, which means "grossly overweight" according to the Oxford Dictionary. This minimum calculation posed by my opponent shows that SSB intake alone gives you almost 400% of the recommended sugar intake. The correlation is obvious.I'll adress more of my oppontent's arguments, like the Cook County example of government distrust, later. P.A.