Beantown Bats Around Price Engineering
The Boston City Council is set to debate a new sugary drinks tax after councilor Sharon Durkan called for a new $0.02 per ounce policy last week. Durkan noted at a Council meeting this week the tax could generate anywhere from $20 to $30 million for the city per year and prevent over 6,000 cases of obesity.
It feels a bit like a throwback to the days when Donald Trump was taking office as president…
- In 2016 and 2017, a slate of cities adopted “soda taxes” on sugary beverages, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, Oakland, Calif. and Boulder, Colo., to name a few.
- While Boston missed the first wave, the proposed tax would seek to replicate the impact those laws have had in the years since their implementation.
A study published in JAMA Health Form last year found that taxes in the above cities (sans Chicago) led to a composite 33.1% increase in prices, of which 92% was passed on to consumers, while purchase volume dropped almost equally by 33%.
However, the tax doesn’t necessarily kill consumers’ sweet tooth: one 2022 study found that sweetened food purchases rose 4.3% in Philadelphia following the tax’s inception, offsetting 19% of the drop in sugar consumption from drinks in the city.
With the second Trump term about to begin, health and wellness has been a prominent theme of the incoming administration, with the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign spearheaded by Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. While RFK’s stance on various diet and medical issues have been controversial (yeah, let’s just go with “controversial”), he’s also been pretty clear on his intent to push back against food ingredients he sees as harmful to Americans’ health. Still, raising taxes as a way of engineering behavior isn’t all that MAGA, right?
One area that’s gotten bipartisan go-ahead is to question food dyes, suggesting the FDA’s new ban on Red No. 3 isn’t going to get much pushback from the new admin, as well as concerns around ultra-processed foods. When it comes to drinks, Kennedy’s no fan of high-fructose corn syrup.
Whether Boston’s interest in a new sugar tax is a signal of a fresh wave of municipal health policy, or just a latecomer to a mid-2010s health trend, it will be something to watch in the early days of the second Trump term. That’s assuming it even goes anywhere beyond a scheduled debate.